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There was a splash and a swirl in the pool, and there was the Mermaid herself, sure enough. Their eyes had grown used to the dusk and they could see her quite plainly, could see too that she was holding out her arms to them and smiling so sweetly that it almost took their breath away.

"My cherished preservers," she cried, "my dear, darling, kind, brave, noble, unselfish dears!"

"You're talking to Reuben, in the plural, by mistake, I suppose," said Francis, a little bitterly.

"To him, too, of course. But you two most of all," she said, swishing her tail around and leaning her hands on the edge of the pool. "I am so sorry I was so ungrateful the other night. I'll tell you how it was. It's in your air. You see, coming out of the water we're very susceptible to aerial influences—and that sort of ungratefulness and, what's the word—?"

"Snobbishness," said Francis firmly.

"Is that what you call it?—is most frightfully infectious, and your air's absolutely crammed with the germs of it. That's why I was so horrid. You do forgive me, don't you, dears? And I was so selfish, too—oh, horrid. But it's all washed off now, in the nice clean sea, and I'm as sorry as if it had been my fault, which it really and truly wasn't."

The children said all right, and she wasn't to mind, and it didn't matter, and all the things you say when people say they are sorry, and you cannot kiss them and say, "Right oh," which is the natural answer to such confessions.

"It was very curious," she said thoughtfully, "a most odd experience, that little boy . . . his having been born of people who had 75