This proposal met my wishes entirely, and under the pretence of going to look at something on the Carnarvon road we managed to escape from the party, Sinfi still carrying her crwth and bow. She then led the way up a slope green with grass and moss. We did not talk till we had passed the slate quarry.

The evening was so fine and the scene was so lovely that Sinfi's very body seemed to drink it in and become intoxicated with beauty. After we had left the slate quarries behind, the panorama became more entrancing at every yard we walked. Cwellyn Lake and Valley, Moel Hebog, y Garnedd, the glittering sea, Anglesey, Holyhead Hill, all seemed to be growing in gold and glory out of masses of sunset mist.

When at last we reached the edge of a steep cliff, with the rocky forehead of Snowdon in front, and the shining llyns of Cwm y Clogwyn below, Sinfi stopped.

'This is the place,' said she, sitting down on a mossy mound, 'where Winnie loved to come and look down.'

After Sinfi and I had sat on this mound for a few minutes, I asked her to sing and play one or two Welsh airs which I knew to be especial favourites of hers, and then, with much hesitancy, I asked her to play and sing the same song or incantation which had become associated for ever with my first morning on the hills.

'You mean the Welsh dukkerin' gillie,' said Sinfi, looking, with an expression that might have been either alarm or suspicion, into my face.

'Yes.'

'You've been a-thinkin' all this while, brother, that I don't know why you asked me about Winnie's favourite places on Snowdon, and why you wanted me to take my crwth to the camp. But I've been a-thinkin' about it, and I know now why you did, and I know why you wants me to play the Welsh dukkerin' gillie here. It's because you heerd me say that if I were to play that dukkerin' gillie on Snowdon in the places she was fond on, I could tell for sartin whether Winnie wur alive or dead. If she wur alive her livin' mullo 'ud follow the crwth. But I ain't a-goin' to do it.'

'Why not, Sinfi?'

'Because my mammy used to say it ain't right to make use o' the real dukkerin' for Gorgios, and I've heerd her say that if them as had the real dukkerin'—the dukkerin' for the Romanies—used it for the Gorgios, or if they turned it into a sport and a plaything, it 'ud leave 'em altogether. And that ain't the wust on it, for when the real dukkerin' leaves you it turns into a kind of a cuss, and it brings on the bite of the Romany Sap. [Footnote] Even now, Hal, I sometimes o' nights feels the bite here of the Romany Sap,' pointing to her bosom, 'and it's all along o' you, Hal, it's all along o' you, because I seem to be breaking the promise about Gorgios I made to my poor mammy.'

[Footnote: The Romany serpent, Conscience.]

'The Romany Sap? You mean the Romany conscience, I suppose, Sinfi: you mean the trouble a Romany feels when he has broken the Romany laws, when he has done wrong according to the Romany notions of right and wrong. But you are innocent of all wrong-doing.'

'I don't know nothin' about conscience,' said she, 'I mean the Romany Sap. Don't you mind when we was a-goin' up Snowdon arter Winifred that mornin'? I told you as the rocks, an' the trees, an' the winds, an' the waters cuss us when we goes ag'in the Romany blood an' ag'in the dukkerin' dook. The cuss that the rocks, an' the trees, an' the winds, an' the waters makes, an' sends it out to bite the burk [Footnote] o' the Romany as does wrong—that's the Romany Sap.'

[Footnote: Breast.]

'You mean conscience, Sinfi.'

'No, I don't mean nothink o' the sort; the Romanies ain't got no conscience, an' if the Gorgios has, it's precious little good as it does 'em, as far as I can see. But the Romanies has got the Romany Sap. Everything wrong as you does, such as killin' a Romany, or cheatin' a Romany, or playin' the lubbany with a Gorgio, or breakin' your oath to your mammy as is dead, or goin' ag'in the dukkerin' dook, an' sich like, every one o' these things turns into the Romany Sap.'

'You're speaking of conscience, Sinfi.'

'Every one o' them wrong things as you does seems to make out o' the burk o' the airth a sap o' its own as has got its own pertickler stare, but allus it's a hungry sap, Hal, an' a sap wi' bloody fangs. An' it's a sap as follows the bad un's feet, Hal—follows the bad un's feet wheresomever they goes; it's a sap as goes slippin' thro' the dews o' the grass on the brightest mornin', an' dodges round the trees in the sweetest evenin', an' goes wriggle, wriggle across the brook jis' when you wants to enjoy yourself, jis' when you wants to stay a bit on the steppin'-stuns to enjoy the sight o' the dear little minnows a-shootin' atween the water-creases. That's what the Romany Sap is.'

'Don't talk like that, Sinfi,' I said; 'you make me feel the sap myself.'

'It's a sap, Hal, as follows you everywheres, everywheres, till you feel as you must stop an' face it whatever comes; an' stop you do at last, an' turn round you must, an' bare your burk you must to the sharp teeth o' that air wenemous sap.'

'Well, and what then, Sinfi?'

'Well then, when you ha' given up to the thing its fill o' your blood, then the trees, an' the rocks, an' the winds, an' the waters seem to know, for everythink seems to begin smilin' ag'in, an' you're let to go on your way till you do somethin' bad ag'in. That's the Romany Sap, Hal, an' I won't deny as I sometimes feel its bite pretty hard here' (pointing to her breast) 'when I thinks what I promised my poor mammy, an' how I kep' my word to her, when I let a Gorgio come under our tents.' [Footnote]

[Footnote: To prevent misconceptions, it may be well to say that the paraphrase of Sinfi's description of the 'Romany Sap,' which appeared in the writer's reminiscences of George Borrow, was written long after the main portion of the present narrative.]

'You don't mean,' I said, 'that it is a real flesh-and-blood sap, but a sap that you think you see and feel.'

'Hal,' said Sinfi, 'a Romany's feelin's ain't like a Gorgio's. A Romany can feel the bite of a sap whether it's made o' flesh an' blood or not, and the Romany Sap's all the wuss for not bein' a flesh-and-blood sap, for it's a cuss hatched in the airth; it's everythink a-cussin' on ye—the airth, an' the sky, an' the dukkerin' dook.'

Her manner was so solemn, her grand simplicity was so pathetic, that I felt I could not urge her to do what her conscience told her was wrong. But soon that which no persuasion of mine would have effected the grief and disappointment expressed by my face achieved.

'Hal,' she said, 'I sometimes feel as if I'd bear the bite o' all the Romany saps as ever wur hatched to give you a little comfort. Besides, it's for a true Romany arter all—it's for myself quite as much as for you that I'm a-goin' to see whether Winnie is alive or dead. If she's dead we sha'n't see nothink, and perhaps if she's in one o' them fits o' hern we sha'n't see nothink; but if she's alive and herself ag'in, I believe I shall see—p'raps we shall both see—her livin' mullo.'

She then drew the bow across the crwth. The instrument at first seemed to chatter with her agitation. I waited in breathless suspense. At last there came clearly from her crwth the wild air I had already heard on Snowdon. Then the sound of the instrument ceased save for the drone of the two bottom strings, and Sinfi's voice leapt out and I heard the words of what she called the Welsh dukkering gillie.

As I listened and looked over the wide-stretching panorama before me, I felt my very flesh answering to every vibration; and when the song stopped and I suddenly heard Sinfi call out, 'Look, brother!' I felt that my own being, physical and mental, had passed into a new phase, and that resistance to some mighty power governing my blood was impossible.

'Look straight afore you, brother, and you'll see Winnie's face. She's alive, brother, and the dukkeripen of the Golden Hand will come true, and mine will come true. Oh, mammy, mammy!'

At first I saw nothing, but after a while two blue eyes seemed gazing at me as through a veil of evening haze. They were looking straight at me, those beloved eyes—they were sparkling with childish happiness as they had sparkled through the vapours of the pool when she walked towards me that morning on the brink of Knockers' Llyn.

Starting up and throwing up my arms, I cried, 'My darling!' The vision vanished. Then turning round, I looked at Sinfi. She seemed listening to a voice I could not hear—her face was pale with emotion. I could hear her breath coming and going heavily; her bosom rose and fell, and the necklace of coral and gold coins around her throat trembled like a shuddering snake while she murmured, 'My dukkeripen! Yes, mammy, I've gone ag'in you and broke my promise, and this is the very Gorgio as you meant.'

'Call the vision back,' I said; 'play the air again, dear Sinfi.'

She sprang in front of me, and seizing one of my wrists, she gazed in my face, and said, 'Yes, it's "dear Sinfi"! You wants dear Sinfi to fiddle the Gorgie's livin' mullo back to you.'

I looked into the dark eyes, lately so kind. I did not know them. They were dilated and grown red-brown in hue, like the scorched colour of a North African lion's mane, and along the eyelashes a phosphorescent light seemed to play. What did it mean? Was it indeed Sinfi standing there, rigid as a column, with a clenched brown fist drawn up to the broad, heaving breast, till the knuckles shone white, as if about to strike me? What made her throw out her arms as if struggling desperately with the air, or with some unseen foe who was binding her with chains?

I stood astounded, watching her, as she gradually calmed down and became herself again; but I was deeply perplexed and deeply troubled.

After a while she said, 'Let's go back to "the Place,"' and without waiting for my acquiescence, she strode along down the path towards Beddgelert.

I was quickly by her side, but felt as little in the mood for talking as she did. Suddenly a small lizard glided from the grass.

'The Romany Sap!' cried Sinfi, and she—the fearless woman before whom the stoutest Gypsy men had quailed—sobbed wildly in terror. She soon recovered herself, and said: 'What a fool you must think me, Hal! It wur all through talkin' about the Romany Sap. At fust I thought it wur the Romany Sap itself, an' it wur only a poor little effet arter all. There ain't a-many things made o' flesh and blood as can make Sinfi Lovell show the white feather; but I know you'll think the wuss o' me arter this, Hal. But while the pictur were a-showin' I heard my dear mammy's whisper: "Little Sinfi, little Sinfi, beware o' Gorgios! This is the one."'

V

By the time we reached the encampment it was quite dark. Panuel, and indeed most of the Gypsies, had turned into the tents for the night; but both Videy Lovell and Rhona Boswell were moving about as briskly as though the time was early morning, one with guile expressed in every feature, the other shedding that aura of frankness and sweet winsomeness which enslaved Percy Aylwin, and no wonder.

Rhona was in a specially playful mood, and came dancing round us more like a child of six than a young woman with a Romany Rye for a lover.

But neither Sinfi nor I was in the mood for frolic. My living-waggon, which still went about wherever the Lovells went, had been carefully prepared for me by Rhona, and I at once went into it, not with the idea of getting much sleep, but in order to be alone with my thoughts. What was I to think of my experiences of that evening? Was I really to take the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes when listening to Sinfi's crwth, or rather when listening to her song, as evidence that Winifred was alive? Oh, if I could, if I could! Was I really to accept as true this fantastic superstition about the crwth and the spirits of Snowdon and the 'living mullo'? That was too monstrous a thought even for me to entertain. Notwithstanding all that had passed in the long and dire struggle between my reason and the mysticism inherited with the blood of two lines of superstitious ancestors, which circumstances had conspired to foster, my reason had only been baffled and thwarted; it had not really been slain.

What, then, could be the explanation of the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes? 'It is hallucination,' I said, 'and it is the result of two very powerful causes—my own strong imagination, excited to a state of feverish exaltation by the long strain of my suffering, and that power in Sinfi which D'Arcy had described as her "half-unconscious power as a mesmerist." At a moment when my will, weakened by sorrow and pain, lay prostrate beneath my own fevered imagination, Sinfi's voice, so full of intense belief in her own hallucination, had leapt, as it were, into my consciousness and enslaved my imagination, which in turn had enslaved my will and my senses.'

For hours I argued this point with myself, and I ended by coming to the conclusion that it was 'my mind's eye' alone that saw the picture of Winifred.

But there was also another question to confront. What was the cause of Sinfi's astonishing emotion after the vision vanished? Such a mingling of warring passions I had never seen before. I tried to account for it. I thought about it for hours, and finally fell asleep without finding any solution of the enigma.

I had no conversation of a private nature with Sinfi until the next evening, when the camp was on the move.

'You had no sleep last night, Sinfi; I can see it by the dark circles round your eyes.'

'That's nuther here nor there, brother,' she said.

I found to my surprise that the Gypsies were preparing to remove the camp to a place not far from Bettws y Coed. I suggested to Sinfi that we two should return to the bungalow. But she told me that her stay there had come to an end. The firmness with which she made this announcement made me sure that there was no appeal.

'Then,' said I, 'my living-waggon will come into use again. The camping place is near some of the best trout streams in the neighbourhood, and I sadly want some trout-fishing.'

'We part company to-day, brother,' she said. 'We can't be pals no more—never no more.'

'Sister, I will not be parted from you: I shall follow you.'

'Reia—Hal Aylwin—you knows very well that any man, Gorgio or Romany, as followed Sinfi Lovell when she told him not, 'ud ketch a body-blow as wouldn't leave him three hull ribs, nor a ounce o' wind to bless hisself with.'

'But I am now one of the Lovells, and I shall go with you. I am a Romany myself—I mean I am becoming more and more of a Romany every day and every hour. The blood of Fenella Stanley is in us both.'

She looked at me, evidently astonished at the earnestness and the energy of my tone. Indeed at that moment I felt an alien among Gorgios.

'I am now one of the Lovells,' I said, 'and I shall go with you.'

'We part company to-night, brother, fare ye well,' she said.

As she stood delivering this speech—her head erect, her eyes flashing angrily at me, her brown fists tightly clenched, I knew that further resistance would be futile.

'But now I wants to be left alone,' she said.

She bent her head forward in a listening attitude, and I heard her murmur, 'I knowed it 'ud come ag'in. A Romany sperrit likes to come up in the evenin' and smell the heather an' see the shinin' stars come out.'

While she was speaking, she began to move off between the trees. But she turned, took hold of both my hands, and gazed into my eyes. Then she moved away again, and I was beginning to follow her. She turned and said: 'Don't follow me. There ain't no place for ye among the Romanies. Go the ways o' the Gorgios, Hal Aylwin, an' let Sinfi Lovell go hern.'

As I leaned against a tree and watched Sinfi striding through the grass till she passed out of sight, the entire panorama of my life passed before me.

'She has left me with a blessing after all,' I said; 'my poor Sinfi has taught me the lesson that he who would fain be cured of the disease of a wasting sorrow must burn to ashes Memory. He must flee Memory and never look back.'

VI

And did I flee Memory? When I re-entered the bungalow next day it was my intention to leave it and Wales at once and for ever, and indeed to leave England at once—perhaps for ever, in order to escape from the unmanning effect of the sorrowful brooding which I knew had become a habit. 'I will now,' I said, 'try the nepenthe that all my friends in their letters are urging me to try—I will travel. Yes, I will go to Japan. My late experiences should teach me that Ja'afar's "Angel of Memory," who refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and tears, did him an ill service. He who would fain be cured of the disease of a wasting sorrow should try to flee the "Angel of Memory," and never look back.'

And so fixed was my mind upon travelling that I wrote to several of my friends, and told them of my intention. But I need scarcely say that as I urged them to keep the matter secret it was talked about far and wide. Indeed, as I afterwards found to my cost, there were paragraphs in the newspapers stating that the eccentric amateur painter and heir of one branch of the Aylwins had at last gone to Japan, and that as his deep interest in a certain charming beauty of an un-English type was proverbial, it was expected that he would return with a Japanese, or perhaps a Chinese wife.

But I did not go to Japan; and what prevented me?

My reason told me that what I had just seen near Beddgelert was an optical illusion. I had become very learned on the subject of optical illusions ever since I had known Sinfi Lovell, and especially since I had seen that picture of Winnie in the water near Bettws y Coed, which I have described in an earlier chapter. Every book I could get upon optical illusions I had read, and I was astonished to find how many instances are on record of illusions of a much more powerful kind than mine.

And yet I could not leave Snowdon. The mountain's very breath grew sweeter and sweeter of Winnie's lips. As I walked about the hills I found myself repeating over and over again one of the verses which Winnie used to sing to me as a child at Raxton.

Eryri fynyddig i mi, Bro dawel y delyn yw, Lle mae'r defaid a'r wyn, Yn y mwswg a'r brwyn, Am can inau'n esgyn i fyny, A'r gareg yn ateb i fyny, i fyny, O'r lle bu'r eryrod yn byw. [Footnote]

[Footnote:

Mountain-wild Snowdon for me! Sweet silence there for the harp, Where loiter the ewes and the lambs, In the moss and the rushes, Where one's song goes sounding up And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher In the height where the eagles live.]

But then I felt that Sinfi was the mere instrument of the mysterious magic of y Wyddfa, that magic which no other mountain in Europe exercises. I knew that among all the Gypsies Sinfi was almost the only one who possessed that power which belonged once to her race, that power which is expressed in a Scottish word now universally misused, 'glamour,' the power which Johnnie Faa and his people brought into play when they abducted Lady Casilis.

Soon as they saw her well-faured face They cast the glamour oure her.

'Yes,' I said, 'I am convinced that my illusion is the result of two causes, my own brooding over Winnie's tragedy and the glamour that Sinfi sheds around her, either consciously or unconsciously; that imperious imagination of hers which projects her own visions upon the senses of another person either with or without an exercise of her own will. This is the explanation, I am convinced.'

Wheresoever I now went, Snowdon's message to my heart was, 'She lives,' and my heart accepted the message. And then the new blessed feeling that Winnie was not lying in a pauper grave had an effect upon me that a few who read these pages will understand—only a few. Perhaps, indeed, even those I am thinking of, those who, having lost the one being they loved, feel that the earth has lost all its beauty—perhaps even these may not be able to sympathise fully with me in this matter, never having had an experience remotely comparable with mine.

When I thought of Winifred lying at the bottom of some chasm in Snowdon, my grief was very great, as these pages show. Yet it was not intolerable; it did not threaten to unseat my reason, for even then, when I knew so little of the magic of y Wyddfa, I felt how close was the connection between my darling and the hills that knew her and loved her. But during the time that her death, amidst surroundings too appalling to contemplate, hung before my eyes in a dreadful picture—during the time when it seemed certain that her death in a garret, her burial in a pauper pit six coffins deep, was a hideous truth and no fancy, all the beauty with which Nature seemed at one time clothed was wiped away as by a sponge. The earth was nothing more than a charnel-house, the skies above it were the roof of the Palace of Nin-ki-gal. But now that Snowdon had spoken to me, the old life which had formerly made the world so beautiful and so beloved came back.

All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my heart. The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the very birds seemed to be warbling at times 'She's alive.'

I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin—

With love I burn: the centre is within me; While in a circle everywhere around me Its Wonder lies—

that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life, The Veiled Queen.

The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:

'The omnipotence of love—its power of knitting together the entire universe—is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.

'Ilyas the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon, Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail, Mixt with the message of the nightingale, And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon, A little maiden dreaming there alone. She babbled of her father sitting pale 'Neath wings of Death—'mid sights of sorrow and bale, And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.

'"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith, While she, with eager lips, like one who tries To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries To Heaven for help—"Plead on; such pure love-breath, Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."

'The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand; Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws; 'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws The father sits, the last of all the band. He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand, "Sleep fans my brow: sleep makes us all pashas; Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws A childless father from an empty land."

'"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:" A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze. Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees, Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.

'Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but "the superficial film" of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal love and beauty.'

This was followed by a still more mystical poem called 'The Persian Slave Girl's Progress to Paradise,' showing the Omnipotence of Love. [Footnote]

[Footnote: This poem of Philip Aylwin's appears now in the present writer's volume, The Coming of Love.]



XIV

SINFI'S COUP DE THEATRE

I

Weeks passed by. I visited all the scenes that were in the least degree associated with Winnie.

The two places nearest to me—Fairy Glen and the Swallow Falls—which I had always hitherto avoided on account of their being the favourite haunts of tourists—I left to the last, because I specially desired to see them by moonlight. With regard to Fairy Glen, I had often heard Winnie say how she used to go there by moonlight and imagine the Tylwyth Teg or the fairy scenes of the Midsummer Night's Dream which I had told her of long ago—imagine them so vividly that she could actually see, on a certain projecting rock in the cliffs that enclose the dell, the figure of Titania dressed in green, with a wreath of leaves round her head. And with regard to the Swallow Falls, I remembered only too well her telling me, on the night of the landslip, the Welsh legend of Sir John Wynn, who died in the seventeenth century, and whose ghost, imprisoned at the bottom of the Falls on account of his ill deeds in the flesh, was heard to shriek amid the din of the waters. On that fatal night she told me that on certain rare occasions, when the moon shines straight down the chasm, the wail will become an agonised shriek. I had often wondered what natural sound this was which could afford such pabulum to my old foe, Superstition. So one night, when the moon was shining brilliantly—so brilliantly that the light seemed very little feebler than that of day—I walked in the direction of the Swallow Falls.

Being afraid that I should not get much privacy at the Falls, I started late. But I came upon only three or four people on the road. I had forgotten that my own passion for moonlight was entirely a Romany inheritance. I had forgotten that a family of English tourists will carefully pull down the blinds and close the shutters, in order to enjoy the luxury of candlelight, lamp-light, or gas, when a Romany will throw wide open the tent's mouth to enjoy the light he loves most of all—'chonesko dood,' as he calls the moonlight. As I approached the Swallow Falls Hotel, I lingered to let my fancy feast in anticipation on the lovely spectacle that awaited me. When I turned into the wood I encountered only one person, a lady, and she hurried back to the hotel as soon as I approached the river.

Following the slippery path as far as it led down the dell, I stopped at the brink of a pool about a dozen yards, apparently, from the bottom, and looked up at the water. Bursting like a vast belt of molten silver out of an eerie wilderness of rocks and trees, the stream, as it tumbled down between high walls of cliff to the platform of projecting rocks around the pool at the edge of which I stood, divided into three torrents, which themselves were again divided and scattered by projecting boulders into cascades before they fell into the gulf below. The whole seemed one wide cataract of living moonlight that made the eyes ache with beauty.

Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of Superstition's gamut as Winifred's might easily accept as the wail of Sir John Wynn's ghost.

There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which appalled Winnie as it appalled me.

The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.

It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh, or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.

When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but with the perfume I love most of all, the night's floating memory of the flowery breath of day.

Suddenly I felt some one touching my elbow. I turned round. It was Rhona Boswell. I was amazed to see her, for I thought that all my Gypsy friends, Boswells, Lovells, and the rest, were still attending the horse-fairs in the Midlands and Eastern Counties.

'We've only just got here,' said Rhona; 'wussur luck that we got here at all. I wants to get back to dear Gypsy Dell and Rington Wood; that's what I wants to do.'

'Where is the camp?' I asked.

'Same place, twix Bettws and Capel Curig.'

She had been to the bungalow, she told me, with a message from Sinfi. This message was that she particularly wished to meet me at Mrs. Davies's cottage—'not at the bungalow'—on the following night.

'She'll go there to-morrow mornin',' said Rhona, 'and make things tidy for you; but she won't expect you till night, same time as she met you there fust. She's got a key o' the door, she says, wot you gev her.'

I was not so surprised at Sinfi's proposed place of meeting as I should have been had I not remembered her resolution not to return to the bungalow, and not to let me return to the camp.

'You must be sure to go to meet her at the cottage to-morrow night, else you'll be too late.'

'Why too late?' I asked.

'Well,' said Rhona, 'I can't say as I knows why ezackly. But I know she's bin' an' bought beautiful dresses at Chester, or somewheres,—an' I think she's goin' to be married the day arter to-morrow.'

'Married to whom?'

'Well, I can't say as I rightly knows,' said Rhona.

'Do you know whether Mr. Cyril is in Wales?' I asked.

'Yes,' said Rhona, 'him and the funny un are not far from Capel Curig. Now I come to think on't, it's mose likely Mr. Cyril as she's a-goin' to marry, for I know it ain't no Romany chal. It can't be the funny un,' added she, laughing.

'But where's the wedding to take place?'

'I can't say as I knows ezackly,' said Rhona; 'but I thinks it's by Knockers' Llyn if it ain't on the top o' Snowdon.'

'Good heavens, girl!' I said. 'What on earth makes you think that? That pretty little head of yours is stuffed with the wildest nonsense. I ran make nothing out of you, so good-night. Tell her I'll be there.'

And I was leaving her to walk down the lane when I turned back and said, 'How long has Sinfi been at the camp?'

'On'y jist come. She's bin away from us for a long while,' said Rhona.

And then she looked as if she was tempted to reveal some secret that she was bound not to tell.

'Sinfi's been very bad,' she went on, 'but she's better now. Her daddy says she's under a cuss. She's been a-wastin' away like, but she's better now.'

'So it's Sinfi who is under a curse now,' I said to myself. 'I suppose Superstition has at last turned her brain. This perhaps explains Rhona's mad story.'

'Does anybody but you think she's going to be married?' I asked her. 'Does her father think so?'

'Her daddy says it ain't Sinfi as is goin' to be married; but I think it's Sinfi! An' you'll know all about it the day arter to-morrow.' And she tripped away in the direction of the camp.

Lost in a whirl of thoughts and speculations, I turned into Fairy Glen. And now, below me, lay the rocky dell so dearly beloved by Winnie; and there I walked in such a magic web of light and shade as can only be seen in that glen when the moon hangs over it in a certain position.

I descended the steps to the stream and sat down for a time on one of the great boulders and asked myself if this was the very boulder on which Winnie used to sit when she conjured up her childish visions of fairyland. And by that sweet thought the beauty of the scene became intensified. There, while the unbroken torrent of the Conway—glittering along the narrow gorge of the glen between silvered walls of rock as upright as the turreted bastions of a castle—seemed to flash a kind of phosphorescent light of its own upon the flowers and plants and sparsely scattered trees along the sides, I sat and passed into Winifred's own dream, and the Tylwyth Teg, which to Winnie represented Oberon and Titania and the whole group of fairies, swept before me.

Awaking from this dream, I looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes, or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion, took away my breath. Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous 'Queen of the Fair People.'

'Never,' I said to myself, 'was there an optical illusion so perfect. I can see the moonlight playing upon her hair. But the hair is not golden, as the hair of the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg should be; it is dark as Winnie's own.'

Then the face turned and she looked at the river, and then I exclaimed 'Winifred!' And then Fairy Glen vanished and I was at Raxton standing by a cottage door in the moonlight. I was listening to a voice—that one voice to whose music every chord of life within me was set for ever, which said,

'I should have to come in the winds, and play around you on the sands. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went.'

The sight vanished. Although I had no doubt that what I had seen was an hallucination, when I moved farther on and stood and gazed at the stream as it went winding round the mossy cliffs to join the Lledr, I felt that Winnie was by my side, her hand in mine, and that we were children together. And when I mounted the steps and strolled along the path that leads to the plantation where the moonlight, falling through the leaves, covered the ground with what seemed symbolical arabesques of silver and grey and purple, I felt the pressure of little fingers that seemed to express 'How beautiful!' And when I stood gazing through the opening in the landscape, and saw the rocks gleaming in the distance and the water down the Lledr valley, I saw the sweet young face gazing in mine with the smile of the delight that illumined it on the Wilderness Road when she discoursed of birds and the wind.

The vividness of the vision of Fairy Glen drove out for a time all other thoughts. The livelong night my brain seemed filled with it.

'My eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest,'

I said to myself as I lay awake. So full, indeed, was my mind of this one subject that even Rhona's strange message from Sinfi was only recalled at intervals. While I was breakfasting, however, this incident came fully back to me. Either Rhona's chatter about Sinfi's reason for wanting to see me was the nonsense that had floated into Rhona's own brain, the brain of a love-sick girl to whom everything spelt marriage—or else poor Sinfi's mind had become unhinged.

II

As I was to sleep at the cottage, and as I knew not what part I might have to play in Sinfi's wild frolic, I told the servants that any letters which might reach the bungalow next morning were to be sent at once to the cottage, should I not have returned thence.

At about the hour, as far as I could guess, when I had first knocked at the cottage door at the beginning of my search for Winnie, I stood there again. The door was on the latch. I pushed it open.

The scene I then saw was so exact a repetition of what had met my eyes when for the first time I passed under that roof, that it did not seem as though it could be real; it seemed as though it must be a freak of memory: the same long low room, the same heavy beams across the ceiling, the same three chairs, standing in the same places where they stood then, the same table, and upon it the crwth and bow. There was a brisk fire, and over it hung the kettle—the same kettle as then. There were on the walls the same pictures, with the ruddy fingers of the fire-gleam playing upon them and illuminating them in the same pathetic way, and in front of the fire sitting upon the same chair, was a youthful female figure—not Winnie's figure, taller than hers, and grander than hers—the figure of Sinfi, her elbows resting upon her knees, and her face sunk meditatively between her hands.

After standing for fully half a minute gazing at her, I went up to her, and laying my hand upon her shoulder, I said, 'This is a good sight for the Swimming Rei, Sinfi.'

At the touch of my hand a thrill seemed to dart through her frame; she leaped up and stared wildly in my face. Her features became contorted by terror—as horribly contorted as Winnie's had been in the same spot and under the same circumstances. Exactly the same terrible words fell upon my ear:—

'Let his children be vagabonds and beg their bread: let them seek it also out of desolate places. So saith the Lord. Amen.'

Then she fell on the floor insensible.

At first I was too astonished, awed, and bewildered to stir from the spot where I was standing. Then I knelt down, and raising her shoulders, placed her head on my knee. For a time the expression of horror on her pale features was fixed as though graven in marble. A jug of water, from which the kettle had been supplied, stood on the floor in the recess. I sprinkled some water over her face. The muscles relaxed, she opened her eyes; the seizure had passed. She recognised me, and at once the old brave smile I knew so well passed over her face. Rhona's words about the curse and the purchase of the dresses seemed explained now. Long brooding over Winnie's terrible fate had unhinged her mind.

'My girl, my brave girl,' I said, 'have you, then, felt our sorrow so deeply? Have you so fully shared poor Winnie's pain that your nerves have given way at last? You are suffering through sympathy, Sinfi; you are suffering poor Winnie's great martyrdom.'

'Oh, it ain't that!' she said, 'but how I must have skeared you!'

She got up and sat upon the chair in a much more vigorous way than I could have expected after such a seizure.

'I am so sorry,' she said. 'It was the sudden feel o' your hand on my shoulder that done it. It seemed to burn me like, and then it made my blood seem scaldin' hot. If I'd only 'a' seed you come through the door I shouldn't have had the fit. The doctor told me the fits wur all gone now, and I feel sure as this is the last on 'em. You must go to Knockers' Llyn with me to-morrow mornin' early. I want you to go at the same time that we started when we tried that mornin' to find Winnie.'

'Then Rhona's story is true,' I thought. 'Her delusion is that she is going to Knockers' Llyn to be married.'

'The weather's goin' to be just the same as it was then,' she said, 'and when we get to Knockers' Llyn where you two breakfasted together, I want to play the crwth and sing the song just as I did then.'

She made no allusion to a wedding. Getting up and pouring the boiling water from the kettle into the teapot, 'Something tells me,' she went on, 'that when I touch my crwth to-morrow, and when I sing them words by the side of Knockers' Llyn, you'll see the picture you want to see, the livin' mullo o' Winnie.'

'Still no allusion to a wedding, but no doubt that will soon come,' I murmured.

'I want to go the same way we went that day, and I want for you and me to see everythink as we seed it then from fust to last.'

I was haunted by Rhona Boswell's words, and wondered when she would begin talking about the wedding at Knockers' Llyn.

She never once alluded to it; but at intervals when the talk between us flagged I could hear her muttering, 'He must see everythink just as he seed it then from fust to last, and then it's good-bye for ever.'

At last she said, 'I've had both the rooms upstairs made tidy to sleep in—one for you and one for me. I'll call you in the mornin' at the proper time. Goodnight.'

I was not sorry to get this summary dismissal and be alone with my thoughts. When I got to bed I was kept awake by recalling the sight I saw on entering the cottage. There seemed no other explanation of it than this, the tragedy of Winifred had touched Sinfi's sympathetic soul too deeply. Her imagination had seized upon the spectacle of Winifred in one of her fits, and had caused so serious a disturbance of her nervous system that through sheer fascination of repulsion her face mimicked it exactly as Winifred's face had mimicked the original spectacle of horror on the sands.

III

It was not yet dawn when I was aroused from the fitful slumber into which I had at last fallen by a sharp knocking at the door. When I answered the summons by 'All right, Sinfi,' and heard her footsteps descend the stairs, the words of Rhona Boswell again came to me.

I found that I must return to the bungalow to get my bath.

The startled servant who let me in asked if there was anything the matter. I explained my early rising by telling him that I was merely going to Knockers' Llyn to see the sunrise. He gave me a letter which had come on the previous evening, and had been addressed by mistake to Carnarvon. As the handwriting was new to me, I felt sure that it was only an unimportant missive from some stranger, and I put it into my pocket without opening it.

On my return I found Sinfi in the little room where we had supped. I guessed that an essential part of her crazy project was that we should breakfast at the llyn.

On the table was a basket filled with the materials for the breakfast.

Another breakfast was spread for us two on the table, and the teapot was steaming. Sinfi saw me look at the two breakfasts and smile.

'We've got a good way to walk before we get to the pool where we are goin' to breakfast,' she said, 'so I thought we'd take a snack before we start.'

As we went along I noticed that the air of Snowdon seemed to have its usual effect on Sinfi. In taking the path that led to Knockers' Llyn we saw before us Cwm-Dyli, the wildest of all the Snowdonian recesses, surrounded by frowning precipices of great height and steepness. We then walked briskly on towards our goal. When the three peaks that she knew so well—y Wyddfa, Lliwedd, and Crib Goch—stood out in the still grey light she stopped, set down her basket, clapped her hands, and said, 'Didn't I tell you the mornin' was a-goin' to be ezackly the same as then? No mists to-day. By the time we get to the llyn the colours o' the vapours, what they calls the Knockers' flags, will come out ezackly as they did that mornin' when you and me first went arter Winnie.'

All the way Sinfi's eyes were fixed on the majestic forehead of y Wyddfa and the bastions of Lliwedd which seemed to guard it as though the Great Spirit of Snowdon himself was speaking to her and drawing her on, and she kept murmuring 'The two dukkeripens.'

But still she said nothing about her wedding, though that some such mad idea as that suggested by Rhona possessed her mind was manifest enough.

'Here we are at last,' she said, when we reached the pool for which we were bound; and setting down her little basket she stood and looked over to the valley beneath.

The colours were coming more quickly every minute, and the entire picture was exactly the same as that which I had seen on the morning when we last saw Winifred on the hills, so unlike the misty panorama that Snowdon usually presents. Y Wyddfa was silhouetted against the sky, and looked as narrow and as steep as the sides of an acorn. Here we halted and set down our basket.

As we did so she said, 'Hark! the Knockers! Don't you hear them? Listen, listen!'

I did listen, and I seemed to hear a peculiar sound as of a distant knocking against the rocks by some soft substance. She saw that I heard the noise.

'That's the Snowdon spirits as guards more copper mines than ever yet's been found. And they're dwarfs. I've seed 'em, and Winnie has. They're little, fat, short folk, somethin' like the woman in Primrose Court, only littler. Don't you mind the gal in the court said Winnie used to call the woman Knocker? Sometimes they knock to show to some Taffy as has pleased 'em where the veins of copper may be found, and sometimes they knock to give warnin' of a dangerous precipuss, and sometimes they knock to give the person as is talkin' warnin' that he's sayin' or doin' somethin' as may lead to danger. They speaks to each other too, but in a v'ice so low that you can't tell what words they're a-speakin', even if you knew their language. My crwth and song will rouse every spirit on the hills.'

I listened again. This was the mysterious sound that had so captivated Winnie's imagination as a child.

The extraordinary lustre of Sinfi's eyes indicated to me, who knew them so well, that every nerve, every fibre in her system, was trembling under the stress of some intense emotion. I stood and watched her, wondering as to her condition, and speculating as to what her crazy project could be.

Then she proceeded to unpack the little basket.

'This is for the love-feast,' said Sinfi.

'You mean betrothal feast,' I said. 'But who are the lovers?'

'You and the livin' mullo that you made me draw for you by my crwth down by Beddgelert—the livin' mullo o' Winnie Wynne.'

'At last then,' I said to myself, 'I know the form the mania has taken. It is not her own betrothal, but mine with Winnie's wraith, that is deluding her crazy brain. How well I remember telling her how I had promised Winnie as a child to be betrothed by Knockers' Llyn. Poor Sinfi! Mad or sane, her generosity remains undimmed.'

Before the breakfast cloth could be laid—indeed before the basket was unpacked—she asked me to look at my watch, and on my doing so and telling her the time, she jumped up and said, 'It's later than I thought. We must lay the cloth arterwards.' She then placed me in that same crevice overlooking the tarn whence Winnie had come to me on that morning.

Knockers' Llyn, it will perhaps be remembered, is enclosed in a little gorge opening by a broken, ragged fissure at the back to the east. Leading to this opening there is on one side a narrow, jagged shelf which runs half-way round the pool. Sinfi's movements now were an exact repetition of everything she did on that first morning of our search for Winnie.

While I stood partially concealed in my crevice, Sinfi took up her crwth, which was lying on the rock.

'What are you going; to do, Sinfi?' I said.

'I'm just goin' to bring back old times for you. You remember that mornin' when my crwth and song called Winnie to us at this very llyn? I'm goin' to play on my crwth and sing the same song now. It's to draw her livin' mullo, as I did at Bettws and Beddgelert, so that the dukkeripen of the "Golden Hand" may come true.'

'But how can it come true, Sinfi?' I said.

'The dukkeripen allus does come true, whether it's good or whether it's bad.'

'Not always,' I said.

'No, not allus,' she cried, starting up, while there came over her face that expression which had so amazed me at Beddgelert. When at last breath came to her she was looking towards y Wyddfa through the kindling haze.

'There you're right, Hal Aylwin. It ain't every dukkeripen as comes true. The dukkeripen allus comes true, unless it's one as says a Gorgio shall come to the Kaulo Camloes an' break Sinfi Lovell's heart. Before that dukkeripen shall come true Sinfi Lovell 'ud cut her heart out. Yes, my fine Gorgio, she'd cut it out—she'd cut it out and fling it in that 'ere llyn. She did cut it out when she took the cuss on herself. She's a-cuttin' it out now.'

Then without saying another word Sinfi took up her crwth and moved towards the llyn.

'You'll soon come back, Sinfi?' I said.

'We've got to see about that,' she replied, still pale and trembling from the effects of that sudden upheaval of the passion of a Titaness. 'If the livin' mullo does come you can't have a love-feast without company, you know, and I sha'n't be far off if you find you want me.'

She then took up her crwth, went round the llyn, and disappeared through the eastern cleft. In a few minutes I heard her crwth. But the air she played was not the air of the song she called the 'Welsh dukkerin' gillie' which I had heard by Beddgelert. It was the air of the same idyll of Snowdon that I first beard Winifred sing on the sands of Raxton. Then I heard in the distance those echoes, magical and faint, which were attributed by Winifred and Sinfi to the Knockers or spirits of Snowdon.

IV

There I stood again, as on that other morning, in the crevice overlooking the same llyn, looking at what might well have been the same masses of vapour enveloping the same peaks, rolling as then, boiling as then, blazing as then, whenever the bright shafts of morning struck them. There I stood again, listening to the wild notes of Sinfi's crwth in the distance, as the sun rose higher, pouring a radiance through the eastern gate of the gorge, and kindling the aerial vapours moving about the llyn till their iridescent sails suggested the wings of some enormous dragon-fly of every hue.

'Her song does not come,' I said, 'but, this time, when it does come, it will not befool my senses. Sinfi's own presence by my side—that magnetism of hers which D'Arcy spoke of—would be required before the glamour could be cast over me, now that I know she is crazy. Poor Sinfi! Her influence will not to-day be able to cajole my eyes into accepting her superstitious visions as their own.'

But as I spoke a sound fell, not upon my ears alone, but upon every nerve of my body, the sound of a voice singing, a voice that was not Sinfi's, but another's,

'I met in a glade a lone little maid, At the foot of y Wyddfa the white; Oh, lissom her feet as the mountain hind, And darker her hair than the night; Her cheek was like the mountain rose, But fairer far to see. As driving along her sheep with a song, Down from the hills came she.'

It was the same voice that I heard singing the same song on Raxton Sands. It was the same voice that I heard singing the same song in the London streets—Winnie's!

And then there appeared in the eastern cleft of the gorge on the other side of the llyn, illuminated as by a rosy steam, Winnie! Amid the opalescent vapours gleaming round the llyn, with eyes now shimmering as through a veil—now flashing like sapphires in the sun—there she stood gazing through the film, her eyes expressing a surprise and a wonder as great as my own.

'It is no phantasm—it is no hallucination,' I said, while my breathing had become a spasmodic, choking gasp.

But when I remembered the vision of Fairy Glen, I said, 'Imagination can do that, and so can the glamour cast over me by Sinfi's music. It does not vanish; ah, if the sweet madness should remain with me for ever! It does not vanish—it is gliding along the side of the llyn: it is moving towards me. And now those sudden little ripples in the llyn—what do they mean? The trout are flying from her shadow. The feet are grating on the stones. And hark! that pebble which falls into the water with a splash; the glassy llyn is ribbed and rippled with rings. Can a phantom do that? It comes towards me still. Hallucination!'

Still the vision came on.

When I felt the touch of her body, when I felt myself clasped in soft arms, and felt falling on my face warm tears, and on my lips the pressure of Winnie's lips—lips that were murmuring, 'At last, at last!'—a strange, wild effect was worked within me. The reality of the beloved form now in my arms declared itself; it brought back the scene where I had last clasped it.

Snowdon had vanished; the brilliant morning sun had vanished. The moon was shining on a cottage near Raxton Church, and at the door two lovers were standing, wet with the sea-water—with the sea-water through which they had just waded. All the misery that had followed was wiped out of my brain. It had not even the cobweb consistence of a dream.

When, after a while, Snowdon and the drama of the present came back to me, my brain was in such a marvellous state that it held two pictures of the same Winnie as though each hemisphere of the brain were occupied with its own vision. I was kissing Winnie's sea-salt lips in the light of the moon at the cottage door, and I was kissing them in the morning radiance by Knockers' Llyn. And yet so overwhelming was the mighty tide of bliss overflowing my soul that there was no room within me for any other emotion—no room for curiosity, no room even for wonder.

Like a spirit awakening in Paradise, I accepted the heaven in which I found myself, and did not inquire how I got there.

This did not last long, however. Suddenly and sharply the moonlight scene vanished, and I was on Snowdon, and there came a burning curiosity to know the meaning of this new life—the meaning of the life of pain that had followed the parting at the cottage door.

V

'Winnie,' I said, 'tell me where we are. I have been very ill since we parted in your father's cottage. I have had the wildest hallucinations concerning you; dreams, intolerable dreams. And even now they hang about me; even now it seems to me that we are far away from Raxton, surrounded by the hills and peaks of Snowdon. If they were real you would be the dream, but you are real; this waist is real.'

'Of course we are on Snowdon, Henry!' said she. 'You must indeed have been ill—you must now be very ill—to suppose you are at Raxton.'

'But what are we doing here?' I said. 'How did we come here?'

'Let Badoura speak for herself only,' she said, with that arch smile of hers. She was alluding to the old days at Raxton, when she hoped that some day her little Camaralzaman would be carried by genii to her as she sat thinking of him by the magic llyn. 'The genie who brought me was Sinfi Lovell. But who brought Camaralzaman? That is a question,' she said, 'I am dying to have answered.'

At the name of Sinfi Lovell the past came flowing in.

'Then there is a Sinfi Lovell, Winnie! And yet she is one of the figures in the dream. There was no Sinfi Lovell with us at Raxton.'

'Of course there is a Sinfi Lovell! You begin to make me as dazed as yourself. You have known her well; you and she were seeking me when I was lost.'

'Then you were lost?' I said. 'That, then, is no dream. And yet if you were lost you have been—But you are alive, Winnie. Let me feel the lips on mine again. You are alive! Snowdon told me at last that you were alive, but I dared not believe it, my darling. I dared not believe that my misery would end thus—thus.'

There came upon her face an expression of distressed perplexity which did more than anything else to recall me to my senses.

'Winnie,' I said, 'my brain is whirling. Let us sit down.'

She sat down by my side.

'You thought your Winnie was dead, Henry. Sinfi Lovell has told me all about it.' Then, looking intently at me, she said, 'And how your sorrow has changed you, dear!'

'You mean it has aged me, Winnie. I have observed it myself, and people tell me it has made me look older than I am by many years. These furrows around the eyes—these furrows on my brow—you are kissing them, dear.'

'Oh, I love them; how I love them!' she said. 'I am not kissing them to smooth them away. To me every line tells of your love for Winnie.'

'And the hair, Winnie—look, it is getting quite grizzled.' Then, as the lovely head sank upon my breast. I whispered in her ears, 'Is there at last sorrow enough in the eyes, Winnie? Has the hardening effect of wealth coarsened my expression? Can a rich man for once enter the kingdom of love? Is the betrothal now complete? Are we both betrothed now?'

I stopped, for bliss and love were convulsing her with sobs until you might have supposed her heart was breaking.

While she lay silent thus, I was able in some degree to call my wits around me. And the difficulty of knowing in what course I ought to direct conversation presented itself, and seemed to numb my faculties and paralyse me.

After a while she became more composed, and sat in a trance, so to speak, of happiness.

But she remained silent. The conversation, I perceived, would have to be directed entirely by me. With the appalling seizures ever present in my mind, I felt that every word that came from my lips was dangerous.

'Look,' I said, 'the colours of the vapours round the llyn are as rich as they were when we breakfasted here together.'

'We breakfasted here together! Why, what do you mean?' she said, looking in my face. 'You forget, Henry, you never knew me in Wales at all; it was only at Raxton that you ever saw me.'

'I mean when you breakfasted with the Prince of the Mist. I was the Prince of the Mist, dear.'

She gave me a puzzled look which scared while it warned me. How cruel it seemed of Sinfi, who had planned this meeting, not to have told me how much and how little Winnie knew of the past.

'You know nothing about the Prince of the Mist except what I told you on Raxton sands,' she said. 'But you have been very ill; you will be well now.'

'Yes,' I said; 'I have found the life I had lost, and these dreams of mine will soon pass.'

As the conversation went on I began to see that she remembered our meetings on the sands—remembered everything up to a certain point. What was that point? This was the question that kept me on tenterhooks.

Every word she uttered, however, shed light into my mind, and served as a warning that I must feel my way cautiously. It was evident to me that in some unaccountable way Sinfi at some time after she left me at Beddgelert had discovered that Winnie was not really dead, and had brought her back to me—brought her back to me restored in mind, but with all memory of what had passed during her dementia erased from her consciousness. Everything depended now upon my learning how much of her past she did remember. A single ill-judged word of mine—a single false move—might ruin all, and bring back the life of misery which I seemed at last to have left behind me.

VI

'Winnie,' I said, 'you have not yet told me how you came here. You have not yet told me how it is that you meet me on Snowdon—meet me in this wonderful way.'

'Oh,' said she with a smile, 'Badoura has been a mere puppet in the play. She had no idea she was going to meet her prince. Sinfi was suddenly seized with a desire that she and I should come back, and visit the dear old places we knew together. I was nothing loth, as you may imagine, but I could not understand what had made her set her heart upon it. When we reached Carnarvonshire I found that Sinfi's people were all encamped near to Bettws y Coed, and we went and stayed there. We visited all the places in the neighbourhood that were associated with her childhood and mine.'

'You went to Fairy Glen?' I said.

'Yes; we went there the night before last and saw it in the moonlight.'

'I was there, and I saw you.'

'Ah! Then the man sitting on the boulder at the bottom was you! How wonderful! Sinfi was there on the step round the corner; she must have seen you. I know now why she suddenly hurried me away. She had told me that she wanted to see the Glen by moonlight'

'Then you did not know that you would meet me here?'

'My dear Henry, do you suppose that if I had known, I could have been induced to take part in anything so theatrical? When I saw you standing here my amazement and joy were so great that I forgot the strange way in which I stood exhibited.'

I felt that the longer she chatted about such matters as these the more opportunities I should get of learning how much and how little she knew of her own story, so I said,

'But tell me how Sinfi contrived to trick you.'

'Well, this morning was the time fixed for our visiting Llyn Coblynau, as we call Knockers' Lynn, which was my favourite place as a child. We were to see it when the colours of the morning were upon it. Then we were to go right to the top of Snowdon and take a mid-day meal at the hut there, and in the evening go down to Llanberis and sleep there. To-morrow morning we were to go to dear old Carnarvon and see again the beloved sea. I find now that her plan was to bring you and me together in this sensational way.'

'Will she join us?' I asked.

'I know no more than you what will be Sinfi's next whim. At the last moment yesterday I was surprised to find that I was not to come with her here, as she was not to sleep in the camp last night because she had promised to see a friend at Capel Curig. And now, shall I tell you how she inveigled me into taking my part in this Snowdon play she was getting up? She told me that she had the greatest wish to discover how the "Knockers' echoes," as they are called, would sound if, in the early morning, she were to play her crwth in one spot and I were to answer it from another spot with a verse of a Welsh song. It seemed a pretty idea, and it was agreed that when I reached the llyn I was to go round it to the opening at the east, pass through the crevice, and wait there till I heard her crwth.'

'Well, Winnie, I must say that the way in which our Gypsy friend manipulated you, and the way in which she manipulated me, shows a method that would have done credit to any madness.'

'You? How did she trick you?'

I was determined not to talk about myself till I had felt my way.

'Winnie, dear,' I said, 'seeing you is such a surprise, and my illness has left me so weak, that I must wait before talking about myself. I shall be more able to do this after I have learnt more of what has befallen you. You say that Sinfi proposed to bring you to Wales; but where were you when she did so? And what brought you into contact with Sinfi again after—after—after you and I were parted in Raxton?'

'Ah! that is a strange story indeed,' said Winifred. 'It bewilders me to recall it as much as it will bewilder you when you come to hear it. I, too, seem to have been ill, and quite unconscious for months and months.'

'Winnie,' I said, 'tell me this strange story about yourself. Tell it in your own way, and do not let me interrupt you by a word. Whenever you see that I am about to speak, stop me—put your hand over my mouth.'

'But where am I to begin?'

'Begin from our first meeting on the sands on the night of the landslip.'

But while I spoke I thought I observed her looking at the breakfast provided by Sinfi with something like the same wistful expression that was on her face on that morning forgotten by her but remembered by me so well, when she breakfasted so heartily on the same spot.

'Winnie,' I said, 'this mountain air has given me a voracious appetite. I wonder whether you could manage to eat some of these good things provided by our theatrical manageress?'

'I wonder whether I could,' said Winnie; 'I'll try—if you'll ask me no questions, but talk about Snowdon and watch the changes of the glorious morning. But we must call Sinfi.'

'No, no. I want to talk to you alone first. By the time your story is over I at least shall be ready for another breakfast, and then we will call her.'

This was agreed upon, and I sat down to my second breakfast with Winnie beside Knockers' Llyn. I sat with my face opposite to the llyn, and we had scarcely begun when I noticed Sinfi's face peeping round a corner of the little gorge. Winnie's back being turned from the llyn she did not see Sinfi, who gave me a sign that her part of that performance was to be looker-on.

I have not time to dwell upon what was said and done during our breakfast in this romantic place, and under these more than romantic circumstances. During the whole of the time the Knockers kept up their knockings, and it really seemed as though the good-natured goblins were expressing their welcome to the child of y Wyddfa.



XV

THE DAUGHTER OF SNOWDON'S STORY

I

After the breakfast was ended Winifred went over the entire drama of that night of the landslip as far as she knew it. There was not an important incident that she missed. Every detail of her narrative was so vividly given that I lived it all over again. She recalled our meeting on the sands, and my inexplicable bearing when she told me of the seaman's present of precious stones to her father. She dwelt upon my mysterious conduct in insisting upon our ascending the cliff by different gangways. She recalled her picking up from the sands a parchment scroll and spelling out by the moonlight the words of the curse it called down upon the head of any one who should violate the tomb from which the parchment and the jewel had been stolen, but as she repeated the words of the curse she was evidently unconscious of the tremendous import of the words in regard to herself and her father. She told me of her desire to conceal from me, for my own sake merely, the evidence afforded by the scroll that my father's tomb had been violated. She recalled my seeing the parchment and being thrown thereby into a state of the greatest mental agony. She recalled my taking her hand as we neared the new tongue of land made by the debris, and peering round it as though in dread of some concealed foe, but evidently she had no idea of what was behind there. She described the way in which my 'foot slipped on the sand,' and how I was thrown back upon her as she stood waiting to pass the debris herself. She spoke of my unaccountable and apparently mad suggestion that we should, although the tide was coming in, and we were already in danger of being imprisoned in the cove and drowned, sit down on the boulder made sacred to us both by our childish betrothal. She spoke of her own suspicion, and then her conviction, that some great calamity was threatening me on account of the violation of the tomb, and that the knowledge of this was governing all these strange movements of mine. She reminded me of my telling her that the shriek we both heard at the moment when the cliff fell was connected with the crime against my father, and that it was the call from the grave which, according to wild traditions, will sometimes come to the heir of an old family. She recalled the very words I used when I told her that in answer to this call I intended to remain there until the tide came in and drowned me. She dwelt upon the way in which I urged her to go and leave me, her own resolution to die with me, and her cutting up her shawl into a rope and tying herself to me. She recalled the sudden thunderous noise of the settlement in response to the tide, and my springing up and running to the mass of debris and looking round it, and then my calling her to join me; and finally she described her running toward Needle Point in order to pass round it before the tide should get any higher, her plunging into the sea and my pulling her round the Point.

It was manifest, from the first word she uttered to the last, that she had no idea who was the 'miscreant,' to use her oft-repeated word, who committed the sacrilege; and nothing could express what relief this gave my heart. I felt as though I had just escaped from some peril too dire to think of with calmness.

'You remember, Henry,' said she, 'how we ran to the cottage in our wet clothes. You remember how we parted at the cottage door. From that night till now we have never met, and now we meet—here on Snowdon—at the very llyn I was always so fond of.

'But tell me more, Winnie—tell me what occurred to you on the next morning.'

'Well,' said she, 'I was always a sound sleeper, but my fatigue that night made me sleep until quite late the next morning. I hurried up and got breakfast ready for father and myself. I then went and rapped at his door, but I got no answer. His room was empty.'

Winifred paused here as though she expected me to say something. A thousand things occurred to me to ask, but until I knew more—until I knew how much and how little she remembered of that dreadful time, I dared ask her nothing—I dared make no remark at all. I said, 'Go on, Winnie; pray do not break your story.'

'Well,' said she, 'I found that my father had not returned during the night. I did not feel disturbed at that, his ways were so uncertain. I did not even hurry over my breakfast, but dallied over it, recalling the scenes of the previous night, and wondering what some of them could mean. I then went down the gangway at Needle Point to walk on the sands. I thought I might meet father coming from Dullingham. I had to pass the landslip, where a great number of Raxton people were gathered. They were looking at the frightful relics of Raxton churchyard. They were too dreadful for me to look at. I walked right to Dullingham without meeting my father. At Dullingham I was told that he had not been there for some days. Then, for the first time, I began to be haunted by fears, but they took no distinct shape. When I returned to the landslip the people were still there, and still very excited about it. In the afternoon I went again on the sands, thinking that I might see my father and also that I might see you. I walked about till dusk without seeing either of you, and then I went back to the cottage. I had now become very anxious about my father, and sat up all night. The next morning after breakfast I went again on the sands. The number of people collected round the landslip seemed greater than ever, and many of them, I think, came from Graylingham, Rington, and Dullingham. They seemed more excited than they had been on the previous day, and they did not notice me as I joined them. I heard some one say in a cracked and piping voice, "Well, it's my belief as Tom lays under that there settlement. It's my belief that he wur standing on the edge of the churchyard cliff, and when the cliff fell he fell with it." Then the kind and good-natured little tailor Shales saw me, and I thought he must have made some signal to the others, for they all stood silent. I felt sure now that for some reason, unknown to me, it was generally believed that my father had perished in the landslip. Mrs. Shales took me by the hand, and gently led me away up the gangway. When we reached the cottage I asked her whether my father's body had been found. She told me that it had not, and was not likely to be found, for if he had really fallen with the landslip his body lay under tons upon tons of earth. I shall never forget the misery of that night; kind Mrs. Shales would not leave me, but slept in the cottage. I had very little doubt that the Raxton people were right in their dreadful guesses about my father. I had very little doubt that while walking along the cliff, either to or from the cottage, he had reached the point at the back of the church at the moment of the landslip, and been carried down with it, and I now felt sure that the shriek you and I both heard was his shriek of terror as he fell. I bethought me of the jewels that my father's sailor friend was to give him, and searched the cottage for them. As I could not find them, I felt sure that it was on his return from his meeting with his sailor friend, when the jewels were upon him, that he fell with the landslip.'

Again Winnie paused as if awaiting some question, or at least some remark from me.

'Did you make no inquiries about me?' I said.

'Oh yes,' said she; 'my grief at the loss of my father was very much increased by my not being able to see you. Mrs. Shales told me that you were ill—very ill. And altogether, you may imagine my misery. Day after day I got worse and worse news of you. 'And day after day it became more and more certain, that my father had perished in the way people supposed. I used to spend most of the day on the sands, gazing at the landslip, and searching for my father's body. Every one tried to persuade me to give up my search, as it was hopeless, for his body was certain to be buried deep under the new tongue of land.'

'But you still continued your search, Winnie?' I said, remembering every word Dr. Mivart had told me in connection with her being found by the fishermen.

'Yes, I found it impossible not to go on with it. But one morning after there had been a great storm followed by a further settlement of the landslip, I went out alone on the cliffs. I said to myself, "This shall be my last search." By this time the news of your illness and the anxiety I felt about you helped much in blunting the anxiety I felt about my father's loss. But on this very morning I am speaking of something very extraordinary happened.

'Don't tell me, Winnie. For God's sake, don't tell me! It will disturb you; it will make you ill again.'

She looked at me in evident astonishment at my words.

'Don't tell you, Henry? Why, there is nothing to tell,' said she. 'As I was walking along the sands, looking at the new tongue of land made by the landslip, I seem to have lost consciousness.'

'And you don't know what caused this?'

'Not in the least; unless it was my anxiety and want of sleep. This was the beginning of the long illness that I spoke of, and I seem to have remained quite without consciousness until a few weeks ago. I often try to make my mind bring back the circumstances under which I lost consciousness. I throw my thoughts, so to speak, upon a wall of darkness, and they come reeling back like waves that are dashed against a cliff.'

'Then don't do so any more, Winnie. I know enough of such matters to tell you confidently that you never will recall the incidents connected with your collapse, and that the endeavour to do so is really injurious to you. What interests me very much more is to know the circumstances under which you came to yourself. I am dying with impatience to know all about that.'

II

'When I came to myself,' said Winifred, 'I was in a world as new and strange and wonderful as that in which Christopher Sly found himself when he woke up to his new life in Shakespeare's play.'

She paused. She little thought how my flesh kindled with impatience.

'Yes, Winnie,' I said; 'you are going to tell me how, and where, and when you were restored to life—regained your consciousness, I mean—unless it will too deeply agitate you to tell me.'

'It would not agitate me in the least, Henry, to tell you all about it. But it is a long story, and this seems a strange place in which to tell it, surrounded by these glorious peaks and covered by this roof of sunrise. But do you tell me all about yourself, all about your illness, which seems to have been a dreadful one.'

My story, indeed! What was there in my story that I could or dare tell her? My story would have to be all about herself, and the tragedy of the supposed curse, and the terrible seizures from which she had recovered, and of which she must never know. I set to work to persuade her to tell me all she knew.

At last she yielded, and said, 'Well, I awoke as from a deep sleep, and found myself lying on a couch, with a man's face bending over mine. I could not help exclaiming, "Henry!'"

'Then did he resemble me?' I asked.

'Only in this—that in his eyes there was the expression which has always appealed to me more than any other expression, whether in human eyes or in the eyes of animals. I mean the pleading, yearning expression of loneliness that there was in your eyes when they were the eyes of a little, lame boy who could not get up the gangways without me.'

'Ah, the egotism of love!' I exclaimed. 'You mean, Winnie, that expression which my unlucky eyes had lost when we met upon the sands after our childhood was passed.'

'But which love,' said she, 'love of Winnie, sorrow for the loss of Winnie, have brought back, increased a thousandfold, till it gives me pain and yet a delicious pain to look into them. Oh, Henry, I can't go on; I really can't, if you look—'

She burst into tears.

When she got calmer she proceeded.

'It was only in the expression of your eyes that he resembled you. He was much older, and wore spectacles. He, on his part, gave a start when he looked into my eyes. It seemed to me that he had been expecting to see something in them which he did not find there, and was a little disappointed. I then heard voices in the room, which was evidently, from the sound of the voices, a large room, and I looked round. I saw that there was another couch close to mine, but nearly hidden from view by a large screen between the two couches. Evidently a woman was lying on the other couch, for I could see her feet; she was a tall woman, for her feet reached out much beyond my own.'

'Good heavens, Winnie,' I exclaimed, 'what on earth is coming? But I promised not to interrupt you. Pray go on, I am all impatience.'

'Well, at the sound of the voices the gentleman started, and seemed much alarmed—alarmed on my account, I thought.

'I then heard a voice say, "A most successful experiment. Look at the face of this other patient, and see the expression on it."

'The gentleman bent over me, and hurriedly raised me from the couch, and then fairly carried me out of the room. But you seem very excited, Henry, you have turned quite pale.'

It would have been wonderful if I had not turned pale. So deeply burnt into my brain had been the picture I had imagined of Winnie dead and in a pauper's grave that even now, with Winnie in my arms, it all came to me, and I seemed to see her lying in a pauper's shroud, and being restored to life, and I said to her, 'Did you observe—did you observe your dress, Winnie?'

She answered my question by a little laugh. 'Did I observe my dress at such a moment? Well, I knew you could be satirical on my sex when you are in the mood, but, Henry, there are moments, I assure you, when the first thing a woman observes is not her dress, and this was one. Afterwards I did observe it, and I can tell you what it was. It was a walking-dress. Perhaps,' said she, with a smile, 'perhaps you would like to know the material? But really I have forgotten that.' 'Pardon my idle question, Winnie—pray go on. I will interrupt you no more.'

'Oh, you will interrupt me no more! We shall see. The gentleman then led me through a passage of some length.'

'Do describe it!'

'I felt quite sure you would interrupt me no more. Well! The dim light in the windows made me guess I was in an old house, and from the sweet smell of hay and wild-flowers I thought we were near the Wilderness, at Raxton. I could only imagine that I had fallen insensible on the sands and been taken to Raxton Hall.'

'Ah! that's where you ought to have been taken.' I could not help exclaiming.

'Surely not,' said Winnie.

'Why?'

'Your mother! But why have you turned so angry?'

In spite of all that I had lately witnessed of my mother's sufferings from remorse, in spite of all the deep and genuine pity that those sufferings had drawn from me, Winnie's words struck deeper than any pity for any creature but herself, and for a moment my soul rose against my mother again.

'Go on, Winnie, pray go on,' I said.

'You will make me talk about myself,' said Winifred, 'when I so much want to hear all about you. This is what I call the self-indulgence of love. Well, then, the gentleman and I mounted some steps and then we entered a tapestried room. The windows—they were quaint and old-fashioned casements—were open, and the sunlight was pouring through them. I then saw at once that I was not anywhere near Raxton. Besides, there was no sea-smell mixed with the perfumes of the flowers and the songs of the birds. That I was not near Raxton, very much amazed me, you may be sure. And then the room was so new to me and so strange. I had never been in an artist's studio, but Sinfi had talked to me of such places, and there were many signs that I was in a studio now.'

'A studio! And not in London! Describe it, Winnie,' I said.

Although she had told me that the house was in the country, my mind flew at once to Wilderspin's studio. 'You say that the gentleman was not young, but that he had an expression of sorrow in his eyes. Had he long iron-grey hair, and was he dressed—dressed, like a—like a shiny Quaker?' So full was my mind of Mrs. Gudgeon's story that I was positively using her language.

'Like a what?' exclaimed Winnie. 'Really, Henry, you have become very eccentric since our parting. The gentleman had not iron-grey hair, and he was not dressed in the least like a Quaker, unless a loose, brown lounge coat tossed on anyhow over a waistcoat and trousers of the same colour is the costume of a shiny Quaker. But it was the room you asked me to describe. There were pictures on the walls, and there were two easels, and on one of them I saw a picture. The gentleman led me to a strange and very beautiful piece of furniture. If I attempted to describe it I should call it a divan, under a gorgeous kind of awning ornamented with Chinese figures in ivory and precious stones. Now, isn't it exactly like an Arabian Nights story, Henry?'

'Yes, yes, Winnie; but pray go on. What did the gentleman do?'

'He drew a chair towards me, and without speaking looked into my face again. The expression in his eyes drew me towards him, as it had at first done when I awoke from my trance; it drew me towards him partly because it said, "I am lonely and in sorrow," and partly from another cause which I could not understand and could never define, howsoever I might try. "Where am I?" I said; "I remember nothing since I fell on the sands. Where is Henry? Is he better or worse? Can you tell me?" The gentleman said, "The friend you inquire about is a long way from here, and you are a long way from Raxton." I asked him why I was a long way from Raxton, and said, "Who brought me here? Do, please, tell me what it means. I am amongst friends—of that I am sure; there is something in your voice which assures me of that; but do tell me what this mystery means." "You are indeed among friends," he said. Then looking at me with an expression of great kindness, he continued, "It would be difficult to imagine where you could go without finding friends, Miss Wynne."'

'Then he knew who you were, Winnie?' I said.

'Yes, he knew who I was,' said she, looking meditatively across the hills as though my query had raised in her own mind some question which had newly presented itself. 'The gentleman told me that I had been very ill and was now recovered, but not so entirely recovered at present that I could with safety be burthened and perplexed with the long story of my illness and what had brought me there. And when he concluded by saying, "You are here for your good," I exclaimed, "Ah, yes; no need for me to be told that," for his voice convinced me that it was so. "But surely you can tell me something. Where is Henry? Is he still ill?" I said. He told me that he believed you to be perfectly well, and that you had lately been living in Wales, but had now gone to Japan. "Henry lately in Wales! now gone to Japan!" I exclaimed, "and he was not with me during the illness that you say I have just recovered from?"'

'Winnie,' I said, 'it was no wonder you asked those questions, but you will soon know all.'

Whilst Winnie had been talking my mind had been partly occupied with words that fell from her about the voice of her mysterious rescuer. They seemed to recall something.

'You were saying, Winnie, that the gentleman had a peculiarly musical voice,' I said.

'So musical,' she replied, 'that it seemed to delight and charm, not my mind only, but every nerve in my body.'

'Could you describe it?'

'Describe a voice,' she said, laughing. 'Who could describe a voice?'

'You, Winnie; only you. Do describe it.'

'I wonder,' she said, 'whether you remember our first walk along the Raxton road, when I made invidious comparison between the voices of birds and the voices of men and women?'

'Indeed I do,' I said. 'I remember how you suggested that among the birds the rooks only could listen without offence to the cackle of a crowd of people.'

'Well, Henry, I can only give you an idea of the gentleman's voice by saying that the most fastidious blackbirds and thrushes that ever lived would have liked it. Indeed they did seem to like it, as I afterwards thought, when I took walks with him. It was music in every variety of tone; and, besides, it seemed to me that this music was enriched by a tone which I had learnt from your own dear voice as a child, the tone which sorrow can give and nothing else. The listener while he was speaking felt so drawn towards him as to love the man who spoke. When his voice ceased, some part of his attraction ceased. But the moment the voice was again heard the magic of the man returned as strong as ever.'

III

For some time during Winnie's narrative glimmerings of the gentleman's identity had been coming to me, and what she said of the voice seemed to be turning these glimmerings into shafts of light. I was now in a state of the greatest impatience to verify my surmise. But this only gave a sharper edge to my intense curiosity as to how she had been rescued by him.

'Winnie,' I said, 'you have said nothing about his appearance. Could you describe his face?'

'Describe his face?' said Winnie. 'If I were a painter I could paint it from memory. But who can paint a face in words?'

Then she launched into a description of the gentleman's appearance, and gave me a specimen of that 'objective' power which used to amaze me as a child but which I afterwards found was a speciality of the girls of Wales.

'I should like a description of him feature by feature,' I said.

She laughed, and said, 'I suppose I must begin with his forehead then. It was almost of the tone of marble, and contrasted, but not too violently, with the thin crop of dark hair slightly curling round the temples, which were partly bald. The forehead in its form was so perfect that it seemed to shed its own beauty over all the other features; it prevented me from noticing, as I afterwards did, that these other features—the features below the eyes, were not in themselves beautiful. The eyes, which looked at me through spectacles, were of a colour between hazel and blue-grey, but there were lights shining within them which were neither grey, nor hazel, nor blue—wonderful lights. And it was to these indescribable lights, moving and alive in the deeps of the pupils, that his face owed its extraordinary attractiveness. Have I sufficiently described him? or am I to go on taking his face to pieces for you?'

'Go on, Winnie—pray go on.'

'Well, then, between the eyes, across the top of the nose, where the bridge of the spectacles rested, there was a strongly marked indented line which had the appearance of having been made by long-continued pressure of the spectacle frame. Am I still to go on?'

'Yes, yes.'

'The beauty of the face, as I said before, was entirely confined to the upper portion. It did not extend lower than the cheek-bones, which were well shaped.'