"No. My life now is happy and tranquil. If I saw more of you my fate would, no doubt, be that of so many others. No, Cécile ... I do not want to see you again." "But perhaps _I_ might care to see you." "You will have the best of me in the verses I shall send you..." "Oh, hang the verses...!" cried Hermione, and turned on to the other side. At the end of a hundred yards, she rolled back again. The poet was harmlessly entertaining himself by taking large mouthfuls of water and spouting them into the air. Hermione burst into a ringing laugh. Applebo regarded her with sleepy inquiry. "You look like a Triton ... with your cheeks puffed out that way," said she. "Don't talk," replied the poet. "It adds to the effort of breathing. You look rather like a mermaid, yourself." Hermione did not answer, and they swam on in silence through the golden August morn. The sensation of cold had passed, and it seemed to the girl that she was of one substance with the sea; of the same essence, the same elemental property, feeling neither warmth nor cold, nor fear, nor fatigue, nor anything that was alien or individual. She found herself a mermaid, at home, and felt that when it pleased her she could leave the surface to explore mysterious green depths far beneath. He, her companion, was of it too. They were sea-mates; Triton and Nereid, subjects of the great god Poseidon, owing no fealty to any lord of the land, knowing no trammels but the wide boundaries of the ocean, that greater dominion of the world. She looked at Applebo. He appeared to be under the water, rather than upon it, and the yellow eyes rose from the swirl of brine to blink at her with comradeship. Hermione wanted to take his hand that they might plunge together to explore unknown depths ... never guessing, innocent girl, that she was well on the road to explore depths just as deep and redoubtable. Well offshore, with their sea-world all about, a sudden odd vibration smote against their vigorous young bodies; a vibration that suggested a sound, felt rather than heard. "Morning colours..." said the poet. "That's the gun from the Reading Room. Look!" He flashed from the water an arm of gleaming gold from which sprang diamonds. Hermione turned upon her face to look toward the yacht flotilla. Down from the trucks of the anchored fleet fluttered the "night-caps," little tongues of black, while pennant and burgee passed them on their race aloft, and the national ensign, the Stars and Stripes, unfurled lazily from the taffrails. To their ears came, with sweet faintness, the shrilling of the sheaves as the halliards spun through them, while from a big steam-yacht, nearly a mile away, came the merry whistle of a bosun's pipe. Hermione looked toward the _Daffodil_, then at Applebo. "Rotten lack of etiquette," said he, and grinned. "I haven't any bunting." "Why not? Are you a member of no clubs?"