Page:The Sea Lady.djvu/69

 "Over?"

"The tail, you know."

My cousin Melville said "Precisely!" with his head and eyebrows. But that was the point that hadn't been clear to him so far, and it took his breath away. Positively—a tail! All sorts of incorrect theories went by the board. Somehow he felt this was a topic not to be too urgently pursued. But he and Mrs. Bunting were old friends.

"And she really has a tail?" he asked.

"Like the tail of a big mackerel," said Mrs. Bunting, and he asked no more.

"It's a most extraordinary situation," he said.

"But what else could I do?" asked Mrs. Bunting.

"Of course the thing's a tremendous experiment," said my cousin Melville, and repeated quite inadvertently, "a tail!"