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“‘Do not go,’ I said.’I saw the priest go by, and someone with him. And the hotel-keepers do not like you to be seen, and if we displease them also we shall starve.’

“‘I want to go,’ she replied.’The sea is stormy, and I may never feel it again.’

“‘No, he is right,’ said Giuseppe.’Do not go—or let one of us go with you.’

“‘I want to go alone,’ she said; and she went alone.

“I tied up their luggage in a piece of cloth, and then I was so unhappy at thinking I should lose them that I went and sat down by my brother and put my arm round his neck, and he put his arm round me, which he had not done for more than a year, and we remained thus I don’t remember how long.

“Suddenly the door flew open and moonlight and wind came in together, and a child’s voice said laughing, ‘They have pushed her over the cliffs into the sea.’

“I stepped to the drawer where I keep my knives.

“‘Sit down again,’ said Giuseppe—Giuseppe of all people! ‘If she is dead, why should others die too?’

“‘I guess who it is,’ I cried, ‘and I will kill him.’

“I was almost out of the door, but he tripped me up and, kneeling upon me, took hold of both my hands and sprained my wrists; first my right one, then my left. No one but Giuseppe would have thought of such a thing. It hurt more than you would suppose, and I fainted. When I woke up, he was gone, and I never saw him again.”

But Giuseppe disgusted me.

“I told you he was wicked,” he said.”No one would have expected him to see the Siren.”

“How do you know he did see her?”

“Because he did not see her ‘often and often,’ but once.”

“Why do you love him if he is wicked?”

He laughed for the first time. That was his only reply.

“Is that the end?” I asked.

“I never killed her murderer, for by the time my wrists were well he was in America; and one cannot kill a priest. As for Giuseppe, he went all over the world too, looking for someone else who had seen the Siren—either a man, or, better still, a woman, for then the child might still have been born. At last he came to Liverpool—is the district probable ?—and there he began to cough, and spat blood until he died.

“I do not suppose there is anyone living now who has seen her. There has seldom been more than one in a generation, and never in my life will there be both a man and a woman from whom tha
t child can be born, who will fetch up the Siren from the sea, and destroy silence, and save the world!”

“Save the world?” I cried.”Did the prophecy end like that?”

He leaned back against the rock, breathing deep. Through all the blue-green reflections I saw him colour. I heard him say: “Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.” I would have asked him more, but at that moment the whole cave darkened, and there rode in through its narrow entrance the returning boat.