Aylwin

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

XII

THE REVOLVING CAGE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

I

I will not trouble the reader with details of the illness that came upon me as the result of my mental agony and physical exhaustion. At intervals I was aware of what was going on around me, but for the most part I was in a semi-comatose state. I realised at intervals that a medical man was sitting by my side, as I lay in bed. Then I had a sense of being moved from place to place; and then of being rocked by the waves. Slowly the periods of consciousness became more frequent and also more prolonged.

My first exclamation was—'Dead! Have I been ill?' and I tried to raise myself in vain.

'Yes, very ill,' said a voice, my mother's.

'Dangerously?'

'For several days you were in danger. Your recovery now entirely depends upon your keeping yourself calm.'

'I am out at sea?'

'Yes,' said my mother; 'in Lord Sleaford's yacht.'

'How did I come here?'

'Well, Henry, I was so anxious to wait for a day or two to learn the sequel of the dreadful tragedy, that I persuaded Lord Sleaford to delay sailing. Next day he called at Belgrave Square, and told us he had heard that you had been taken suddenly ill and were lying unconscious at the studio. I went at once and saw the medical man, Mr. Finch, whom Mr. Wilderspin had called in. This gentleman took a serious view of your case. When I asked him what could be done he said that nothing would benefit you so much as removal from London, and recommended a sea voyage. It occurred to me at once to ask Lord Sleaford if we might take you in his yacht, and he with his usual good-nature agreed, and agreed also that Mr. Finch should accompany us as your medical attendant.'

'You know all?' I said; 'you know that she is dead.'

'Alas! yes.'

At that moment the doctor came into the cabin, and my mother retired.

'When did you last see Wilderspin?' I asked Mr. Finch.

'Before leaving England to join a friend in Paris he went to Belgrave
Square to get tidings of you, and I was there.'

'He told you—what had occurred to make me ill?'

'He told me that it was the death of some one in whom you took an interest, a model of his, but told it in such a wild and excited way that I lost patience with him. His addled brains are crammed with the wildest and most ignorant superstitions.'

'Did you ask him about her burial?'

'I did. I gathered from him that she was buried by the parish in the usual way. But I assure you the man's account of everything that occurred was so bewildered and so incoherent that I could really make nothing out of him. What is his creed? Is it Swedenborgianism? He seems to think that the model he has lost is a spirit (or spiritual body, to use his own jargon) sent to him by the artistic-minded spirits for entirely artistic purposes, but snatched from him now by the mean jealousy of the same spirit-world.' 'But what did he say about her burial?' 'Well, he seems not to have ignored so completely the mundane question of burying this spiritual body as his creed would have warranted, for he gave the mother money to bury it. The mother, however, seems to have spent the money in gin and to have left the duty of burying the spiritual body to the parish, who make short work of all bodies; and, of course, by the parish she was buried, you may rest assured of that, though the artist seems to think that she was simply translated to heaven like Elijah.'

'I must return to England at once,' I said. 'I shall apply to the
Home Secretary to have the body disinterred.'

'Why, sir?'

'In order that she may be buried in a proper place, to be sure.'

'No use. You have no locus standi.'

'What do you mean?'

'You are not a relative, and to ask for a disinterment for such an unimportant reason as that you, a stranger, would prefer to see her buried elsewhere, would be idle.'

Sleaford now came into the cabin. I thanked him for his kindness, but told him I must return at once.

'Even if your health permitted,' he said, 'it is impossible for the yacht to go back. I have an appointment to meet a yachting friend. But in any case depend upon it, old fellow, the doctor won't hear of your returning for a long while yet. He told me not five minutes ago that nothing but sea air, and keeping your mind tranquil, you know, will restore you.'

The feeling of exhaustion that came upon me as he spoke convinced me that there was only too much truth in his words. I felt that I must yield to the inevitable; but as to tranquillity of mind, my entire being was now filled with a yearning to see the New North Cemetery—to see her grave. I seemed to long for the very pang which I knew the sight of the grave would give me.

It is of course impossible for me to linger over that cruise, or to record any of the incidents that took place at the ports at which we touched and landed. My recovery, or rather my partial recovery, was slower than the doctor had anticipated. Weeks and months passed, and still there seemed but little improvement in me.

The result was that I was obliged to yield to the importunities of my mother, and to the urgent advice of Dr. Finch, to remain on board Sleaford's yacht during the entire cruise, and afterwards to go with them to Italy.

Absence from England gave me not the smallest respite from the grief that was destroying me.

My parting with my mother was a very pathetic one. She was greatly changed, and I knew why. The furrows Time sets on the face can never be mistaken for those which are caused by the passions. The struggle between pride and remorse had been going on apace; her sufferings had been as great as my own.

It was in Rome we parted. We were sitting in the cool, perfumed atmosphere of St. Peter's, and for the moment a soothing wave seemed to pass over my soul. For some little time there had been silence between us. At length I said, 'Mother, it seems strange indeed for me to have to say to you that you blame yourself too much for the part you took in the tragedy of Winnie. When you sent her into Wales you didn't know that her aunt was dead; you did it, as you thought, for her good as well as for mine.'

She rose as if to embrace me, and then sank down again.

'But you don't know all, Henry; you don't know all. I knew her aunt was dead, though Shales did not, or he would never have taken her. All that concerned me was to get her away before your own recovery. I thought there might be relatives of hers or friends whom Shales might find. But I was possessed by a frenzied desire to get her away. For years my eyes had been fixed on the earldom. I had been told by your aunt that Cyril was consumptive, and also that he was very unlikely to marry.'

I could not suppress a little laugh. 'Ha, ha! Cyril consumptive! No man's stronger and sounder, I am glad to tell you; but if by ill-chance he should die and the title should come to me, then, mother, I'll wear the coronet, and it shall be made of the best gingerbread gilt and ornamented thus. I'll give public lectures on the British aristocracy and its origin, and its present relations to the community, and my audience shall consist of society—that society which is so much to aunt and the likes of her. Society shall be my audience, and then, after my course of lectures is over, I will join the Gypsies. But pray pardon me, mother. I had no idea I should thus lose my temper. I should not have lost it so entirely had I not witnessed how you are suffering from the tyranny of this blatant bugbear called "Society."'

'My suffering, Henry, has brought me nearer to your line of thought than you may suppose. It has taught me that when the affections are deeply touched everything which before had seemed so momentous stands out in a new light, that light in which the insignificance of the important stands revealed. In that terrible conflict between you and me on the night following the landslip, you spoke of my "cruel pride." Oh, Henry, if you only knew how that cruel pride had been wiped out of existence by remorse, I believe that even you would forgive me. I believe that even she would if she were here.'

'I told you that I had entirely forgiven you, mother, and that I was sure Winnie would forgive you if she were alive.'

'You did, Henry, but it did not satisfy me; I felt that you did not know all.'

'I fear you have been very unhappy,' I said.

'I have been constantly thinking of Winifred a beggar in the streets as described by Wilderspin. Oh, Henry, I used to think of her in the charge of that woman. And Miss Dalrymple, who educated her, tells me that in culture she was far above the girls of her own class; and this makes the degradation into which she was forced through me the more dreadful for me to think of. I used to think of her dying in the squalid den, and then the Italian sunshine has seemed darker than a London fog. Even the comfort that your kind words gave me was incomplete, for you did not know the worst features of my cruelty.'

'But have you had no respite, mother? Surely the intensity of this pain did not last, or it would have killed you.'

'The crisis did pass, for, as you say, had it lasted in its most intense form, it would have killed me or sent me mad. After a while, though remorse was always with me, I seemed to become in some degree numbed against its sting. I could bear at last to live, but that was all. Yet there was always one hour out of the twenty-four when I was overmastered by pathetic memories, such as nearly killed me with pity—one hour when, in a sudden and irresistible storm, grief would still come upon me with almost its old power. This was on awaking in the early morning. I learnt then that if there is trouble at the founts of life, there is nothing which stirs that trouble like the twitter of the birds at dawn. At Florence, I would, after spending the day in wandering with you through picture galleries or about those lovely spots near Fiesole, go to bed at night tolerably calm; I would sink into a sleep, haunted no longer by those dreams of the tragedy in which my part had been so cruel, and yet the very act of waking in the morning would bring upon me a whirlwind of anguish; and then would come the struggling light at the window, and the twitter of the birds that seemed to say, "Poor child, poor child!" and I would bury my face in my pillow and moan.'

When I looked in her face, I realised for the first time that not even such a passion of pity as that which had aged me is so cruel in its ravages as Remorse. To gaze at her was so painful that I turned my eyes away.

When I could speak I said,

'I have forgiven you from the bottom of my heart, mother, but, if that does not give you comfort, is there anything that will?'

'Nothing, Henry, nothing but what is impossible for me ever to get—the forgiveness of the wronged child herself. That I can never get in this world. I dare only hope that by prayers and tears I may get it in the end. Oh, Henry, if I were in heaven I could never rest until I had sought her out, and found her and thrown myself on her neck and said, "Forgive your persecutor, my dear, or this is no place for me."'

II

As soon as I reached London, thinking that Wilderspin was still on the Continent, I went first to D'Arcy's studio, but was there told that D'Arcy was away—that he had been in the country for a long time, busy painting, and would not return for some months. I then went to Wilderspin's studio, and found, to my surprise and relief, that he and Cyril had returned from Paris. I learnt from the servant that Wilderspin had just gone to call on Cyril; accordingly to Cyril's studio I went.

'He is engaged with the Gypsy-model, sir,' said Cyril's man, pointing to the studio door, which was ajar. 'He told me that if ever you should call you were to be admitted at once. Mr. Wilderspin is there too.'

'You need not announce me,' I said, as I pushed open the door.

Entering the studio, I found myself behind a tall easel where Cyril
was at work. I was concealed from him, and also from Wilderspin and
Sinfi. On my left stood Cyril's caricature of Wilderspin's 'Faith and
Love,' upon which the light from a window was falling aslant!

Before I could pass round the easel into the open space I was arrested by overhearing a conversation between Cyril, Sinfi, and Wilderspin.

They were talking about her!

With my eyes fixed on Cyril's caricature on my left hand; I stood, every nerve in my body seeming to listen to the talk, while the veil of the goddess-queen in the caricature appeared to become illuminated; the tragedy of our love (from the spectacle of her father's dead body shining in the moonlight, with a cross on his breast, down to the hideous-grotesque scene of the woman at the corner of Essex Street) appeared to be represented on the veil of the mocking queen in little pictures of scorching flame. These are the words I heard:

'Keep your head in that position, Lady Sinfi,' said Cyril, 'and pray do not get so excited.'

'I thought I felt the Swimmin' Rei in the room,' said Sinfi.

'What do you mean?'

'I thought I felt the stir of him in my burk [bosom]. Howsomever, it must ha' bin all a fancy o' mine. But you see, Mr. Cyril, she wur once a friend o' mine. I want to know what skeared her? If it was her as set for the pictur, she'd never 'a' had the fit if she hadn't, 'a' bin skeared. I s'pose Mr. Wilderspin didn't go an' say the word "feyther" to her? I s'pose he didn't go an' ax her who her feyther was?'

I heard Wilderspin's voice say. 'No, indeed. I would never have asked who her father was. Ah, Mr. Cyril, I knew how mysteriously she had come to me; why should I ask who was her father? Her earthly parentage was not an illusion. But you will remember that I was not in the studio at the time of the fit. Mr. Ebury had called about a commission, and I had gone into the next room to speak to him. You came into the studio at the time, Mr. Cyril. When I returned, I found her in the fit, and you standing over her.'

'No, don't get up, Sinfi, my girl,' I heard Cyril say. 'Sit down quietly, and I will tell you what, passed. There is no doubt I did ask her about her father, poor thing; but I did it with the best intentions—did it for her good, as I thought—did it to learn whether she had been kidnapped, and certainly not from idle curiosity.'

'Scepticism, the curse of the age,' said Wilderspin.

I heard Cyril say, 'Who could have thought it would turn out so? But you yourself had told me, Wilderspin, of Mother Gudgeon's injunction not to ask the girl who her father was, and of course it had upon me the opposite effect the funny hag had intended it to have upon you. It was hard to believe that such a flower could have sprung from such a root. I thought it very likely that the woman had told you this to prevent your getting at the truth about their connection; so I decided to question the model myself, but determined to wait till you had had a good number of sittings, lest there should come a quarrel with the woman.'

'Well, an' so you asked her?' said Sinfi.

'I thought the moment had come for me to try to read the puzzle,' said Cyril. 'So, on that day when Ebury called, when you, Wilderspin, had left us together, I walked up to her and said, "Is your father alive?"'

'Ah!' cried Sinfi, 'it was as I thought. It was the word "feyther" as killed her! An' what'll become o' him?'

'The word "father" seemed to shoot into her like a bullet,' said
Cyril. 'She shrieked "Father," and her face looked—'

'No, don't, tell me how she looked!' said Sinfi. 'Mr. Wilderspin's pictur' o' the witch and the lady shows how she looked—whoever she was. But if it was Winnie Wynne. what'll become o' him?'

Then I heard. Cyril address Wilderspin again. 'We had great difficulty, you remember, Wilderspin, in bringing her round, and afterwards I took her out of the house, put her into a cab, and you directed your servant whither to take her.'

'It was scepticism that ruined all.' I heard Wilderspin say.

'And yet,' said Sinfi, 'the Golden Hand on Snowdon told as he'd marry
Winifred Wynne. Ah! surely the Swimmin' Rei is in the room! I thought
I heard that choke come in his throat as comes when he frets about
Winnie. Howsomever, I s'pose it must ha' bin all a fancy o' mine.'

'You make me laugh, Sinfi, about this golden hand of yours that is stronger than the hand of Death,' said Cyril; 'and yet I wish from my heart I could believe it.'

'My poor mammy used to say, "The Gorgios believes when they ought to disbelieve, and they disbelieve when they ought to believe, and that gives the Romanies a chance."'

'Sinfi Lovell,' said Wilderspin, 'that saying of your mother's touches at the very root of romantic art.'

'Well, if Gorgios don't believe enough, Sinfi,—if there is not enough superstition among certain Gorgio acquaintances of mine, it's a pity,' said Cyril.

'I don't know what you are a-talkin' about with your romantic art an' sich like, but I do know that nothink can't go ag'in the dukkeripen o' the clouds; but if I was on Snowdon with my crwth I could soon tell for sartin whether she's alive or dead,' said Sinfi.

'And how?' said Cyril.

'How? By playin' on the hills the old Welsh dukkerin' tune [Footnote 1] as she was so fond on. If she was dead, she wouldn't hear it, but if she was alive she would, and her livin' mullo [Footnote 2] 'ud come to it,' said Sinfi.

[Footnote 1: Incantation song.]

[Footnote 2: Wraith or fetch.]

'Do you believe that possible?' said Cyril, turning to Wilderspin.

'My friend,' said Wilderspin, 'I was at that moment repeating to myself certain wise and pregnant words quoted from an Oriental book by the great Philip Aylwin—words which tell us that he is too bold who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in any wise the mind of God—not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall one day suffer.'

'But,' said Sinfi, 'about her as sat to Mr. Wilderspin; did she never talk at all, Mr. Cyril?'

'Never; but I saw her only three times,' said Cyril.

'Mr. Wilderspin,' said Sinfi, 'did she never talk?'

'Only once, and that was when the woman addressed her as Winifred. That name set me thinking about the famous Welsh saint and those wonderful miracles of hers, and I muttered "St. Winifred." The face of the model immediately grew bright with a new light, and she spoke the only words I ever heard her speak.'

'You never told me of this,' said Cyril.

'She stooped,' said Wilderspin, 'and went through a strange kind of movement, as though she were dipping water from a well, and said, "Please, good St. Winifred, bless the holy water and make it cure—"'

'Ah, for God's sake stop!' cried Sinfi. 'Look! the Swimmin' Rei! He's in the room! There he stan's, and he's a-hearin' every word, an' it'll kill him outright!'

I stared at Cyril's picture of Leæna for which Sinfi was sitting. I heard her say,

'There ain't nothink so cruel as seein' him take on like that; I've seed it afore, many's the time, in old Wales. You'll find her yit. The dukkeripen says you'll marry her yit, and you will. She can't be dead when the sun and the golden clouds say you'll marry her at last. Her as is dead must ha' been somebody else.'

'Sinfi, you know there is no hope.'

'It might not ha' bin your Winnie, arter all,' said she. 'It might ha' bin some poor innocent as her feyther used to beat. It's wonderful how cruel Gorgio feythers is to poor born naterals. And she might ha' heerd in London about St. Winifred's Well a-curin' people.'

'Sinfi,' I said, 'you know there is no hope. And I have no friend but you now—I am going back to the Romanies.'

'No, no, brother,' she said, 'never no more.'

She put on her shawl. I rose mechanically. When she bade Cyril and Wilderspin good-bye and passed out of the studio, I did so too. In the street she stood and looked wistfully at me, as though she saw me through a mist, and then bade me good-bye, saying that she must go to Kingston Vale where her people were encamped in a hired field. We separated, and I wandered I knew not whither.

III

I found myself inquiring for the New North Cemetery, and after a time I stood looking through the bars of tall iron gates at long lines of gravestones and dreary hillocks before me. Then I went in, walking straight over the grass towards a gravedigger digging in the sunshine. He looked at me, resting his foot on his spade.

'I want to find a grave.'

'What part was the party buried in?'

'The pauper part,' I said.

'Oh,' said he, losing suddenly his respectful tone. 'When was she buried? I suppose it was a she by the look o' you.'

'When? I don't know the date.'

'Rather a wide order that, but there's the pauper part.' And he pointed to a spot at some little distance, where there were no gravestones and no shrubs. I walked across to this Desert of Poverty, which seemed too cheerless for a place of rest. I stood and gazed at the mounds till the black coffins underneath grew upon my mental vision, and seemed to press upon my brain. Thoughts I had none, only a sense of being another person.

The man came slowly towards me, and then looked meditatively into my face. I shall never forget him. A tall, sallow, emaciated man he was, with cheek-bones high and sharp as an American Indian's, and straight black hair. He looked like a wooden image of Mephistopheles, carved with a jack-knife.

'Who are you?' The words seemed to come, not from the gravedigger's mouth, but from those piles of lamp-blacked coffins which were searing my eyes through four feet of graveyard earth. By the fever-fires in my brain I seemed to see the very faces of the corpses.

'Who am I?' I said to myself, as I thought, but evidently aloud; 'I am the Fool of Superstition. I am Fenella Stanley's Fool, and Sinfi Lovell's Fool, and Philip Aylwin's Fool, who went and averted a curse from one of the heads resting down here, averted a curse by burying a jewel in a dead man's tomb.'

'Not in this cemetery, so none o' your gammon,' said the gravedigger, who had overheard me. 'The on'y people as is fools enough to bury jewels with dead bodies is the Gypsies, and they take precious good care, as I know, to keep it mum where they bury 'em. There's bin as much diggin' for them thousand guineas as was buried with Jerry Chilcott in Foxleigh Parish, where I was born, as would more nor pay for emptying a gold mine; but I never heard o' Christian folk a-buryin' jewels. But who are you?'

I felt a hand upon my shoulder, and looking round, I found Sinfi by my side.

'Does he belong to you, my gal?'

'Yis,' said Sinfi, with a strange, deep ring in her rich contralto voice. 'Yis, he belongs to me now—leastways he's my pal now—whatever comes on it.'

'Then take him away, my wench. What's the matter with him? The old complaint, I s'pose,' he added, lifting his hand to his mouth as though drinking from a glass.

Sinfi gently put out her hand and brushed the man aside.

'I've bin a-followin' on you all the way, brother,' said Sinfi, as we moved out of the cemetery, 'for your looks skeared me a bit. Let's go away from this place.'

'But whither, Sinfi? I have no friend but you; I have no home.'

'No home, brother? The kairengros [Footnote] has got about everythink, 'cept the sky an' the wind, an' you're one o' the richest kairengros on 'em all—leastways so I wur told t'other day in Kingston Vale. It's the Romanies, brother, as 'ain't got no home 'cept the sky an' the wind. Howsumever, that's nuther here nor there; we'll jist go to the woman they told me on, an' if there's any truth to be torn out of her, out it'll ha' to come, if I ha' to tear out her windpipe with it.'

[Footnote: The house-dwellers.]

We took a cab and were soon in Primrose Court.

The front door was wide open—fastened back. Entering the narrow common passage, we rapped at a dingy inner door. It was opened by a pretty girl, whose thick chestnut hair and eyes to match contrasted richly with the dress she wore—a dirty black dress, with great patches of lining bursting through holes like a whity-brown froth.

'Meg Gudgeon?' said the girl in answer to our inquiries; and at first she looked at us rather suspiciously, 'upstairs, she's very bad—like to die—I'm a-seein' arter 'er. Better let 'er alone; she bites when she's in 'er tantrums.'

'We's friends o' hern,' said Sinfi, whose appearance and decisive voice seemed to reassure the girl.

'Oh, if you're friends that's different,' said she. 'Meg's gone off 'er 'ead; thinks the p'leace in plain clothes are after 'er.'

We went up the stairs. The girl followed us. When we reached a low door, Sinfi proposed that she should remain outside on the landing, but within ear-shot, as 'the sight o' both on us, all of a suddent, might make the poor body all of a dither if she was very ill.'

The girl then opened the door and went in. I heard the woman's voice say in answer to her,

'Friend? Who is it? Are you sure, Poll, it ain't a copper in plain clothes come about that gal?'

The girl came out, and signalling me to enter, went leisurely downstairs. Leaving Sinfi outside on the landing, I entered the room. There, on a sort of truckle-bed in one corner, I saw the woman. She slowly raised herself up on her elbows to stare at me. I took for granted that she would recognise me at once; but either because she was in drink when I saw her last, or because she had got the idea of a policeman in plain clothes, she did not seem to know me. Then a look of dire alarm broke over her face and she said,

'P'leaceman, I'm as hinicent about that air gal as a new-born babe.'

'Mrs. Gudgeon,' I said, 'I only want you to tell a friend of mine about your daughter.'

'Oh yis! a friend o' yourn! Another or two on ye in plain clothes behind the door, I dessay. An' pray who said the gal wur my darter? What for do you want to put words into the mouth of a hinicent dyin' woman? I comed by 'er 'onest enough. The pore half-starved thing came up to me in Llanbeblig churchyard.'

'Llanbeblig churchyard?' I exclaimed, drawing close up to the bed. 'How came you in Llanbeblig churchyard?' But then I remembered that, according to her own story, she had married a Welshman.

'How did I come in Llanbeblig churchyard?' said the woman in a tone in which irony and fear were strangely mingled. 'Well, p'leaceman, I don't mean to be sarcy: but seein' as all my pore dear 'usband's kith and kin o' the name o' Goodjohn was buried in Llanbeblig churchyard, p'raps you'll be kind enough to let me go there sometimes, an' p'raps be buried there when my time comes.'

'But what took you there?' I said.

'What took me to Llanbeblig churchyard?' exclaimed the woman, whose natural dogged courage seemed to be returning to her. 'What made me leave every fardin' I had in the world with Poll Onion, when we ommust wanted bread, an' go to Carnarvon on Shanks's pony? I sha'n't tell ye. I comed by the gal 'onest enough, an' she never comed to no 'arm through me, less mendin' 'er does for 'er, and bringin' 'er to London, and bein' a mother to 'er, an' givin' 'er a few baskets an' matches to sell is a-doin' 'er any 'arm. An' as to beggin' she would beg, she loved to beg an' say texes.'

'Old kidnapper!' I cried, maddened by the visions that came upon me.
'How do I know that she came to no harm with a wretch like you?'

The woman shrank back upon the pillows in a revival of her terror. 'She never comed to no 'arm, p'leaceman. No, no, she never comed to no 'arm through me. I'd a darter once o' my own, Jenny Gudgeon by name—p'raps you know'd 'er, most o' the coppers did—as was brought up by my sister by marriage at Carnarvon, an' I sent for 'er to London, I did, pl'eaceman—God forgi'e me—an' she went wrong all through me bein' a drinkin' woman an' not seein' arter 'er, just as my son Bob tookt to drink, through me bein' a drinkin' woman an' not seein' arter him. She tookt and went from bad to wuss, bad to wuss; it's my belief as it's allus starvation as drives 'em to it; an' when she wur a-dyin' gal, she sez to me, "Mother," sez she, "I've got the smell o' Welsh vi'lets on me ag'in: I wants to be buried in Llanbeblig churchyard, among the Welsh child'n an' maids, mother. I wants to feel the snowdrops, an' smell the vi'lets, an' the primroses, a-growin' over my 'ead," sez she; "but that can't never be, mother," sez she, a-sobbin' fit to bust; "never, never, for such as me," sez she. An' I know'd what she meant, though she never once blamed me, an' 'er words stuck in my gizzard like a thorn, p'leaceman.'

'But what has all this to do with the girl you kidnapped?'

'Ain't I a-tellin' on ye as fast as I can? When my pore gal dropped off to sleep, I sez to Polly Onion, "Poll," I sez, "to-morrow mornin' I'll pop every-think as ain't popped a'ready, an' I'll leave you the money to see arter 'er, an' I'll start for Carnarvon on Shanks's pony. I knows a good many on the road," sez I, "as won't let Jokin' Meg want for a crust and a sup, an' when I gits to Carnarvon I'll ax 'er aunt to bury 'er (she sells fish, 'er aunt does,"' sez I, "and she's got a pot o' money), an' then I'll see the parson or the sexton or somebody," sez I, "an' I'll tell 'em I've got a darter in London as is goin' to die, a Carnarvon gal by family, an' I'll tell 'im she ain't never bin married, an' then they'll bury 'er where she can smell the primroses and the vi'lets." That's what I sez to Poll Onion, an' then Poll she begins to pipe, an' sez, "Oh Meg, Meg, ain't I a Carnarvon gal too? The likes o' us ain't a-goin' to grow no vi'lets an' snowdrops in Llanbeblig churchyard." An' I sez to her, "What a d—d fool you are, Poll! You never 'adn't a gal as went wrong through you a-drinkin', else you'd never say that. If the parson sez to me, 'Is your darter a vargin-maid?' d'ye think I shall say, 'Oh no, parson'? I'll swear she is a vargin-maid on all the Bibles in all the churches in Wales." That's jis' what I sez to Polly Onion, God forgi'e me. An' Poll sez, "The parson'll be sure to send you to hell, Meg, if you do that air." An' I sez, "So he may, then, but I shall do it, no fear." That's what I sez to Poll Onion (she's downstairs at this werry moment a-warmin' me a drop o' beer); it was 'er as showed you upstairs, cuss 'er for a fool; an' she can tell you the same thing as I'm a-tellin' on you.'

'But what about her you kidnapped? Tell me all about it, or it will be worse for you.'

'Ain't I a-tellin' you as fast as I can? Off to Carnarvon I goes, an' every futt o' the way I walks—Lor' bless your soul, there worn't a better pair o' pins nowheres than Meg Gudgeon's then, afore the water got in 'em an' bust 'em; an' I got to Llanbeblig churchyard early one mornin', and there I seed the pore half-sharp gal. So you see I comed by 'er 'onest enough, p'leaceman, though she worn't ezzackly my own darter.'

'Well, well,' I said; 'go on.'

'Yes, it's all very well to say "go on," p'leaceman; but if you'd got as much water in your legs as I've got in mine, an' if you'd got no more wind in your bellows than I've got in mine, you'd find it none so easy to go on.'

'What was she doing in the churchyard?'

'Well, p'leaceman, I'm tellin' you the truth, s'elp me Bob! I was a-lookin' over the graves to see if I could find a nice comfortable place for my pore gal, an' all at once I heered a kind o' sobbin' as would a' made me die o' fright if it 'adn't a' bin broad daylight, an' then I see a gal a-layin' flat on a grave an' cryin', an' when I got up to her I seed as she wur covered with mud, an' I seed as she wur a-starvin'.'

'Good God, woman, you are lying! you are lying!'

'No, I ain't a-lyin'. She tookt to me the moment she clapped eyes on me; most people does, and them as don't ought, an' she got up an' put her arms round my neck, and she called me "Knocker."'

'Called you what?'

'Ain't I a-tellin' you? She called me "Knocker"; and that's the very name as she allus called me up to the day of 'er death, pore dear! I tried to make 'er come along o' me, an' she wouldn't stir, an' so I left 'er, meanin' to go back; but when I got to my sister's by marriage, there was a letter for me an' it wur from Polly Onion, a-sayin' as my pore Jenny died the same day as I left London, a-sayin', "Mother, vi'lets, vi'lets; mother, vi'lets, vi'lets!" an' was buried by the parish. An' that upset me, p'leaceman, an' made me swownd, an' when I comed to, I couldn't hear nothink only my pore Jenny's voice a-sobbin' on the wind, "Mother, vi'lets, vi'lets; mother, vi'lets, vi'lets!" an' that sent me off my 'ead a bit, an' I run out o' the 'ouse, an' there was Jenny's voice a-goin' on before me a-sobbin', "Mother, vi'lets, vi'lets; mother, vi'lets, vi'lets!" an' it seemed to lead me back to the churchyard; an' lo an' be'old! there was the pore half-starved creatur' a-settin' there jist as I'd left 'er, an' I sez, "God bless you, my gal, you're a-starvin'!" an' she jumped up, an' she comed an' throwed 'er arms round my waist, an' there we stood both on us a-cryin' togither, an' then I runned back into Carnarvon, an' fetched 'er some grub, an' she tucked into the grub.—But hullo! p'leaceman, what's up now? What the devil are you a-squeedgin' my 'and like that for? Are you a-goin' to kiss it? It ain't none so clean, p'leaceman. You're the rummest copper in plain clothes ever I seed in all my born days. Fust you seem as if you want to bite me, you looks so savage, an' then you looks as if you wants to kiss me; you'll make me laugh, I know you will, an' that'll make me cough.—Hi! Poll Onion, come 'ere. Bring my best lookin'-glass out o' my bowdore, an' let me look at my ole chops, for I'm blowed if there ain't a copper in plain clothes this time as is fell 'ead over ears in love with me, jist as the young swell did at the studero.'

'Go on, Mrs. Gudgeon,' I said; 'go on. She ate the food?'

'Oh, didn't she jist! And the pore half-sharp thing took to me, an' I took to she, an' I thinks to myself, "She's a purty gal, if she's ever so stupid, an' she'll get 'er livin' a-sellin' flowers o' fine days, an' a-doin' the rainy-night dodge with baskets when it's wet "; an' so I took 'er in, an' in the street she'd all of a suddent bust out a-singin' songs about Snowdon an' sich like, just as if she was a-singin' in a dream, and folk used to like to 'ear 'er an' gev 'er money; an' I was a good mother to 'er, I was, an' them as sez I worn't is cussed liars.'

'And she never came to any harm?' I said, holding the great muscular hands between my two palms, unwilling to let them go. 'She never came to any harm?'

'Ain't I said so more nor wunst? I swore on the Bible—there's the very Bible, under the match-box, agin the winder—on that very Bible I swore as my port Jenny brought from Wales, an' as I've never popped yit that this pore half-sharp gal should never go wrong through me; an' then, arter I swore that, my pore Jenny let me alone, an' I never 'eard 'er v'ice no more a-cryin'. "Mother, vi'lets, vi'lets; mother, vi'lets, vi'lets!" An' many's the chap as 'as come leerin' after 'er as I've sent away with a flea in 'is ear. Cuss 'em all; they's all bad alike about purty gals, men is. She's never comed to no wrong through me. Didn't I ammost kill a real sailor capting when I used to live in the East End 'cause he tried to meddle with 'er? An' worn't that the reason why I left my 'um close to Radcliffe 'Ighway an' comed 'ere? Them as killed 'er wur the cussed lot in the studeros. I'm a dyin' woman; I'm as hinicent as a new-born babe. An' there ain't nothink o' 'ern in this room on'y a pair o' ole shoes an' a few rags in that ole trunk under the winder.'

I went to the trunk and raised the lid. The tattered, stained remains of the very dress she wore when I last saw her in the mist on Snowdon! But what else? Pushed into an old worn shoe, which with its fellow lay tossed among the ragged clothes, was a brown stained letter. I took it out. It was addressed to 'Miss Winifred Wynne at Mrs. Davies's.' Part of the envelope was torn away. It bore the Graylingham post-mark, and its superscription was in a hand which I did not recognise, and yet it was a hand which seemed half-familiar to me. I opened it; I read a line or two before I fully realised what it was—the letter, full of childish prattle, which I had written to Winifred when I was a little boy—the first letter I wrote to her.

I forgot where I was, I forgot that Sinfi was standing outside the door, till I heard the woman's voice exclaiming, 'What do you want to set on my bed an' look at me like that for?—you ain't no p'leaceman in plain clothes, so none o' your larks. Git off o' my bed, will ye? You'll be a-settin' on my bad leg an' a-bustin' on it in a minit. Git off my bed, else look another way; them eyes o' yourn skear me.'

I was sitting on the side of her bed and looking into her face.
'Where did you get this?' I said, holding out the letter.

'You skears me, a-lookin' like that,' said she. 'I comed by it 'onest. One day when she was asleep, I was turnin' over 'er clothes to see how much longer they would hold together, when I feels a somethink 'ard sewed up in the breast; I rips it open, and it was that letter. I didn't put it back in the frock ag'in, 'cause I thought it might be useful some day in findin' out who she was. She never missed it. I don't think she'd 'ave missed anythink, she wur so oncommon silly. You ain't a-goin' to pocket it, air you?'

I had put the letter in my pocket, and had seized the shoes and was going out of the room; but I stopped, took a sovereign from my purse, placed it in an envelope bearing my own address which I chanced to find in my pocket, and, putting it into her hand, I said, 'Here is my address and here is a sovereign. I will tell your friend below to come for me or send whenever you need assistance.' The woman clutched at the money with greed, and I left the room, signalling to Sinfi (who stood on the landing, pale and deeply moved) to follow me downstairs. When we reached the wretched room on the ground-floor we found the girl hanging some wet rags on lines that were stretched from wall to wall.

'What is your name?' I said.

'Polly Unwin,' replied she, turning round with a piece of damp linen in her hand.

'And what are you?'

'What am I?'

'I mean what do you do for a living?'

'What do I do for a living?' she said. 'All kinds of things—help the men at the barrows in the New Cut sell flowers, do anything that comes in my way.'

'Never mind what she does for a livin', brother,' said Sinfi; 'give her a gold balanser or two, and tell her to see arter the woman.'

'Here is some money,' I said to the girl. 'See that Mrs. Gudgeon upstairs wants for nothing. Is that story of hers true about her daughter and Llanbeblig churchyard?'

'That's true enough, though she's a wunner at a lie: that's true enough.'

But as I spoke I heard a noise like the laugh or the shriek of a maniac. It seemed to come from upstairs.

'She's a-larfin' ag'in,' said the girl. 'It's a very wicked larf, sir, ain't it? But there's wuss uns nor Meg Gudgeon for all 'er wicked larf, as I knows. Many a time she's kep' me from starvin'. I mus' run up an' see 'er. She'll kill herself a-larfin' yit.'

The girl hurried upstairs and I followed her, leaving Sinfi below. I re-entered the bedroom. There was the woman, her face buried in the pillow, rocking and rolling her body half round with the regularity of a pendulum. Between the peals of half-smothered hysterical laughter that came from her, I could hear her say:

'Dear Lord Jesus, don't forget to love dear Henry who can't git up the gangways without me.'

The words seemed to fall upon my heart like a rain of molten metal dropping from the merciless and mocking skies. But I had ceased to wonder at the cruelty of Fate. The girl went to her and shook her angrily. This seemed to allay her hysterics, for she rolled round upon her back and stared at us. Then she looked at the envelope clutched in her hand, and read out the address,

'Henry, Henry, Henry Halywin, Eskeuer! An' I tookt 'im for a copper in plain clothes all the while! Henry, Henry, Henry Halywin, Eskeuer! I shall die a-larfin', I know I shall! I shall die a-larfin', I know I shall! Poll! don't you mind me a-tellin' you about my pore darter Winifred—for my darter she was, as I'll swear afore all the beaks in London—don't you mind me a-sayin' that if she wouldn't talk when she wur awake, she could mag away fast enough when she wur asleep; an' it were allus the same mag about dear little Henry, an' dear Henry Halywin as couldn't git up the gangways without 'er. Well, pore dear Henry was 'er sweet'airt, an' this is the chap, an' if my eyes ain't stun blind, the werry chap out o' the cussed studeros as killed 'er, pore dear, an' as is a-skearin' me away from my beautiful 'um in Primrose Court; an' 'ere wur I a-talkin' to 'im all of a muck sweat, thinkin' he wur a copper in plain clothes!'

At this moment Sinfi entered the room. She came up to me, and laying her hand upon my shoulder she said: 'Come away, brother, this is cruel hard for you to bear. It's our poor sister Winifred as is dead, and it ain't nobody else.'

The effect of Sinfi's appearance and of her words upon the woman was like that of an electric shock. She sat up in her bed open-mouthed, staring from Sinfi to me, and from me to Sinfi.

'So my darter Winifred's your sister now, is she?' (turning to me). 'A few minutes ago she was your sweet'airt: an' now she seems to ha' bin your sister. An' she was your sister, too, was she?' (turning to Sinfi). 'Well, all I know is, that she was my darter, Winifred Gudgeon, as is dead, an' buried in the New North Cemetery, pore dear; an' yet she was sister to both on ye!'

She then buried her face again in the pillows and resumed the rocking movement, shrieking between her peals of laughter: 'Well, if I'm the mother of a six-fut Gypsy gal an' a black-eyed chap as seems jest atween a Gypsy and a Christian, I never knowed that afore. No, I never knowed that afore! I allus said I should die a-larfin', an' so I shall; I'm a-dyin' now—ha! ha! ha!'

She fell back upon the pillow, exhausted by her own cruel merriment.

'She always said she'd die a-larfin', an' she will, too—more nor I shall ever do,' said the girl, after we had gone downstairs.

'Did you notice what she said about Winnie a-callin' her Knocker?' said Sinfi.

'Yes, and couldn't understand it.'

'I know what it meant. Winnie knowed all about the Knockers of Snowdon, the dwarfs o' the copper mine, and this woman, bein' so thick and short, must look ezackly like a Knocker, I should say, if you could see one.'

I said to the girl, 'Was she really kind to—to—'

'To her you were asking about,—the Essex Street Beauty? I should think she just was. She's a drinker, is poor Meg, and drinking in Primrose Court means starvation. Meg and the Beauty were often short enough of grub, but, drunk or sober, Meg would never touch a mouthful till the Beauty had had her fill. I noticed it many a time—not a mouthful. When Meg was obliged to send her into the streets to sell things she was always afraid that the Beauty might come to harm through the toffs and the chaps. The toffs were the worst looking after her—as they mostly are—so I was always watching her in the day-time, and at night Meg was always watching her, and that was what made me know your face, as soon as ever I clapt eyes on it.'

'Why, what do you mean?'

'Well, one rainy night when I was standing by the theatre door, I heard a toff ask a policeman about the Essex Street Beauty, and I thought I knew what that meant very well. So I ran off to find Meg. I had seen her watching the Beauty all the time. But lo and behold! Meg was gone and the Beauty too. So I run across here, and found Meg and the Beauty getting their supper as quiet as possible. Meg had heard the toff talking to the policeman—though I didn't know she was standing so near—and whisked her off and away as quick as lightning.'

'That was I,' I said. 'God! God! If I had only known!'

'There's the same look now on your face as there was then, and I should know it among ten thousand.'

'Polly Onion,' I said, 'there is my address, and if ever you want a friend, and if you are in trouble, you will know where to find assistance,' and I gave her another sovereign.

'You're a good sort,' said she, 'and no mistake.'

'Good-bye,' I said, shaking her hand. 'See well after Mrs. Gudgeon.'

'All right,' said she, and a smile broke over her face. 'I think I ought to tell you now,' she continued, 'that Meg's no more ill of dropsy than I am; she could walk twenty miles off the reel; there ain't a bullock in England half as strong as Meg; she's shamming.'

'Shamming, but why?'

'Well, she ain't drunk; ever since the Beauty died she's never touched a drop o' gin. But she's turned quite cranky. She's got it into her head that the relations of the Beauty are going to send her to prison for kidnapping; and she thinks that every one that comes near her is a policeman in plain clothes. She's just lying in bed to keep herself out of the way till she starts.'

'Where's she going, then?'

'She talks about going to see after her son Bob in the country; her husband is a Welshman. He's over the water.'

'Did you say she had given up drinking?' I asked.

'Yes; she seemed to dote on the Beauty, and when the Beauty died she said, "My darter went wrong through me drinkin', and my son Bob went wrong through me drinkin'; and I feel somehow that it was through my drinkin' that I lost the Beauty; and never will you find me touch another drop o' gin, Poll. Beer I ain't fond on, and it 'ud take a rare swill o' beer to get up as far as Meg Gudgeon's head."'

'There ain't much fault to be found with a woman like Meg Gudgeon,' said Sinfi. 'Was the Beauty fond o' her? She ought to ha' bin.'

'She used to call her Knocker,' said the girl. 'She seemed very fond of her when they were together, but seemed to forget her as soon as they were apart.'

Sinfi and I then left the house.

In Great Queen Street she took my hand as if to bid me good-bye. But she stood and gazed at me wistfully, and I gazed at her. At last she said,

'An' now, brother, we'll jist go across to Kingston Vale, an' see my daddy, an' set your livin'-waggin to rights.'

'Then, Sinfi,' I said, 'you and I are once more—'

I stopped and looked at her. The fearless young Amazon and seeress, who kept a large family of the Kaulo Camloes in awe, was supposed to have nearly conquered the feminine weakness of tears; but she had not. There was a chink in the Amazon's armour, and I had found it.

'Yis,' said she, nodding her head and smiling. 'You an' me's right pals ag'in.'

As we were going I told her how I had replaced the jewel in the tomb.

'I know'd you would do it. Yis, I heer'd you telling the gravedigger the same thing.'

'And yet,' said I bitterly, 'in spite of that and in spite of the
Golden Hand, she is dead.'

Sinfi stood silently looking at me now. Even her prodigious faith seemed conquered.

IV

For a few days I paced with Sinfi over Wimbledon Common and Richmond
Park, The weather was now unusually brilliant for the time of year.
Sinfi would walk silently by my side.

But I could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a house not far from Eaton Square—though to me London was a huge meaningless maze of houses clustered around Primrose Court—that horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished; poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of the desert. Impossible to stay there!—for the pavement seemed actually to scorch my feet, like the floor of a fiery furnace. To me the sun above was but the hideous eye of Circumstance which had stared down pitilessly on that bare head of hers, and blistered those feet.

The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy—my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch—what determined me to leave London at once—was the sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of London infuriated me.

'Died in beggar's rags—died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by. 'Died in a hovel!—and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth one breath from those lips—this London spurned her, left her to perish alone in her squalor and misery.'

Cyril and Wilderspin had returned to the Continent. D'Arcy was still away.

I made application to the Home Secretary to have the pauper grave opened. On the ground that I was 'not a relative of the deceased,' the officials refused to institute even preliminary inquiries.

During this time no news of Mrs. Gudgeon had come to me through Polly Onion, and I determined to go to Primrose Court and see what had become of her.

When I reached Primrose Court I found that the shutters of the house were up. Knocking and getting no response, I ascertained from a pot-boy who was passing the corner of the court that Mrs. Gudgeon had decamped. Neither the pot-boy nor any one in the court could tell me whither she was gone.

'But where is Polly Onion?' I asked anxiously; for I was beginning to blame myself bitterly for having neglected them.

'I can tell you where poor Polly is,' said the pot-boy. 'She's in the
New North Cemetery. She fell downstairs and broke her neck.'

'Why, she lived downstairs,' I said.

'That's true; you seem to be well up in the family, sir. But Poll couldn't pay her rent, so old Meg took her in. And on the very morning when Meg and Poll were a-startin' off together into the country—it was quite early and dark—Poll stumbles over three young flower-gals as 'ad crep' in the front door in the night time and was makin' the stairs their bed. Gals as hadn't made enough to pay for their night's lodgin' often used to sleep on Meg's stairs. Poll was picked up as nigh dead as a toucher, and she died at the 'ospital.'

Toiling in the revolving cage of Circumstance, I strove in vain against that most appalling form of envy—the envy of one's fellow creatures that they should live and breathe while there is no breath of life for the one.

My uncle Cecil's death had made me a rich man; but what was wealth to me if it could not buy me respite from the vision haunting me day and night—the vision of the attic, the mattress, and the woman?

And as I thought of the powerlessness of wealth to give me one crumb of comfort, and remembered Winnie's sermon about wealth, I would look at myself in the mirror above my mantelpiece and smile bitterly at the sight of the hollow cheeks, furrowed brow, and melancholy eyes, and recall her words about her hovering near me after she was dead.

The thought of my wealth and the squalor in which she had died was, I think, the most maddening thought of all. I had now become the possessor of Wilderspin's picture 'Faith and Love,' having bought it of the Bond Street dealer to whom it belonged; and also of the 'Christabel' picture, and these I was constantly looking at as they hung up on the walls of my room. After a while, however, I destroyed the 'Christabel' picture, it was too painful. Though I would not see such friends as I had, I read their letters; indeed, it was these same letters which alone could draw from me a grim smile now and then.

Almost every letter ended by urging me, in order to flee from my sorrows, to travel! With the typical John Bull travelling seems to be always the panacea. In sorrow, John's herald of peace is Baedeker: the dispenser of John's true nepenthe is Mr. Murray. Pity and love for Winifred pursued me, tortured me nigh unto death, and therefore did these friends of mine seem to suppose that I wanted to flee from my pity and sorrow! Why, to flee from my sorrow, to get free of my pity, to flee from the agonies that went nigh to tearing soul from body, would have been to flee from all that I had left of life—memory.

Did I want to flee from Winnie? Why, memory was Winnie now; and did I want to flee from her? And yet it was memory that was goading me on to the verge of madness. No doubt the reader thinks me a weak creature for allowing the passion of pity to sap my manhood in this fashion. But it was not so much her death as the manner of her death that withered my heart and darkened my soul. The calamities which fell upon her, grievous beyond measure, unparalleled, not to be thought of save with a pallor of cheek and a shudder of the flesh, were ever before me, mocking me—maddening me.

'Died in a hovel!' As I gave voice to this impeachment of Heaven, night after night, wandering up and down the streets, my brain was being scorched and withered by those same thoughts of anger against destiny and most awful revolt which had appalled me when first I saw how the curse of Heaven or the whim of Circumstance had been fulfilled.

Then came that passionate yearning for death, which grief such as mine must needs bring. But if what Materialism teaches were true, suicide would rob me even of my memory of her. If, on the other hand, what I had been taught by the supernaturalism of my ancestors were true, to commit suicide might be but to play finally into the hands of that same unknown pitiless power with whom my love had all along been striving.

'Suicide might sever my soul from hers for ever.' I said, and then the tragedy would seem too monstrously unjust to be true, and I said: 'It cannot be—such things cannot be: it is a hideous dream. She is not dead! She is in Wales with friends at Carnarvon, and I shall awake and laugh at all this imaginary woe!'

And what were now my feelings towards the memory of my father? Can a man cherish in his heart at one and the same moment scorn of another man for believing in the efficacy of a curse, and bitter anger against him for having left a curse behind him? He can! On my return to London after my illness I had sent back to Wilderspin the copy of The Veiled Queen he had lent me. But from the library of Raxton Hall I brought my father's own copy, elaborately bound in the tooled black calf my father affected. The very sight of that black binding now irritated me; never did I pass it without experiencing a sensation that seemed a blending of scorn and fear: scorn of the ancestral superstitions the book gave voice to: fear of them.

One day I took the book from the shelves and then hurled it across the room. Stumbling over it some days after this, a spasm of ungovernable rage came upon me, for terribly was my blood struggling with Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin, and thousands of ancestors, Romany and Gorgio, who for ages upon ages had been shaping my destiny. I began to tear out the leaves and throw them on the fire. But suddenly I perceived the leaves to be covered with marginalia in my father's manuscript, and with references to Fenella Stanley's letters—letters which my father seemed to have studied as deeply as though they were the writings of a great philosopher instead of the scribblings of an ignorant Gypsy. My eye had caught certain written words which caused me to clutch at the sheets still burning on the fire. Too late!—I grasped nothing save a little paper-ash. Then I turned to the pages still left in my hand, and read these words of my father's:

'These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose hands this copy of my book will come. Until he gave me his promise to bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world. But even he failed to understand what he called "my superstition." He did not know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers—the cross which had received the last kiss from her lips—I had been able to focus all the scattered rays of thought—I had been able to vitalise memory till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness—the happiness that springs from loving a memory—living with a memory—till it becomes a presence—an objective reality. He did not know that, by holding her continually in my thoughts, by means of the amulet, I achieved at last the miracle described by the Hindoo poets—the miracle of reshaping from the undulations of "the three regions of the universe the remembered object by the all-creative magic of love!"'

Then followed some translations from the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom—visions something akin, as I imagine, to those experienced by convulsionnaires. And then after all this learning came references to poor ignorant Fenella Stanley's letters and extracts from them.

In one of these extracts I was startled to come upon the now familiar word 'crwth.'

'De Welch fok ses as de livin mullos only follow the crwth on Snowdon wen it is playde by a Welch Chavi, but dat is all a lie. Dey follows the crwth when a Romany Chi plays it as I nows very wel, but de chavi wot play on the crwth, shee must love the living mullo she want for to come, and de living mullo must love her.'

And then followed my father's comments on the extract.

'N.B.—To see and hear a crwth, if possible, and ascertain the true nature of the vibrations. But there are said to be only a few crwths in existence; and very likely there is no musician who could play upon them.'

Then followed a few sentences written at a later date.

'The crwth is now becoming obsolete; on inquiry I learn that it is a stringed instrument played with a bow like a violin; but as one of the feet of the bridge passes through one of the sound-holes and rests on the inside of the back, the vibrations must be quite unique, if we remember how important a part is played by the back in all instruments of the violin kind. It must be far more subtle than the vibrations of the Welsh harp, and even more subtle (if also more nasal) than those of the violin.

'The reason why music has in all ages been called in to aid in evoking the spirits, the reason why it is as potent now as ever it was in aiding the spirits to manifest themselves, is simple enough: the rhythmic vibrations of music set in active motion the magnetic waves through whose means alone the two worlds, spiritual and material, can hold communication. The quality and the value of these vibrations depend mainly, no doubt, upon the magnetic power, conscious or other, of the musician, but partly also upon the kind of instrument used. The vibrations awakened by stringed instruments have been long known to be more subtle than any others: instruments of the violin kind are of course the most subtle of all. Doubtless this is why among the Welsh hills the old saying used to be "The spirits follow the crwth."'

'Which folly is the more besotted,' I said, as I read and re-read the marginalia—'that of the scholar with his scientific nonsense about vibrations, or that of the ignorant Gypsy with her living mullos drawn through the air by music and love?'

But now my eyes fell upon a very different kind of marginal note which ran thus:—

'The one important fact of the twentieth century will be the growth and development of that great Renascence of Wonder which set in in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.

'The warring of the two impulses governing man (and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious life)—the impulse of acceptance, the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder—will occupy all the energies of the next century.

'The old impulse of wonder which came to the human race in its infancy has to come back—has to triumph—before the morning of the final emancipation of man can dawn.

'But the wonder will be exercised in very different fields from those in which it was exercised in the past. The materialism which at this moment seems to most thinkers inseparable from the idea of evolution will go. Against their own intentions certain scientists are showing that the spiritual force called life is the maker and not the creature of organism—is a something outside the material world, a something which uses the material world as a means of phenomenal expression.

'The materialist, with his primitive and confiding belief in the testimony of the senses, is beginning to be left out in the cold, when men like Sir W. R. Grove turn round on him and tell him that "the principle of all certitude" is not and cannot be the testimony of his own senses; that these senses, indeed, are no absolute tests of phenomena at all; that probably man is surrounded by beings he can neither see, feel, hear, nor smell; and that, notwithstanding the excellence of his own eyes, ears, and nose, the universe the materialist is mapping out so deftly is, and must be, monophysical, lightless, colourless, soundless—a phantasmagoric show—a deceptive series of undulations, which become colour, or sound, or what not, according to the organism upon which they fall.'

These words were followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about "the Omnipotence of Love," which showed, beyond doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very original poet. And this made me perplexed as to what could have drawn Wilderspin, who scorned the art of poetry, into the meshes of The Veiled Queen. Perhaps, however, it was because Wilderspin's ancestry was, notwithstanding his English name, largely, if not wholly, Welsh, as I learnt from Cyril. Welshmen, whether sensitive or not to the rhythmic expression of the English language, are almost all, I believe, of the poetic temperament.

But from this moment my mind began to run upon the picture of Fenella Stanley, surrounded by those Snowdonian spirits which her music was supposed to have evoked from the mountain air of the morning.

XIII

THE MAGIC OF SNOWDON

I

In a few days I left London and went to North Wales.

Opposite to me in the railway carriage sat an elderly lady, into whose face I occasionally felt myself to be staring in an unconscious way. But I was merely communing with myself: I was saying to myself, 'My love of North Wales, and especially of Snowdon, is certainly very strong; but it is easily accounted for—it is a matter of temperament. Even had Wales not been associated with Winnie, I still must have dearly loved it. Much has been said about the effect of scenery upon the minds and temperaments of those who are native to it. But temperament is a matter of ancestral conditions: the place of one's birth is an accident. As some, like my cousin Percy, for instance are born with a passion for the sea, and some with a passion for forests, some with a passion for mountains, and some with a passion for rolling plains. The landscape amid which I was born had, no doubt, a charm for me, and could bring to me that nature-ecstacy which I inherited from Fenella Stanley. But with Wales I actually fell in love the moment I set foot in the country. This is why I am hurrying there now.'

And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very much. She did not know that underneath the soul's direst struggle—the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the ancestral blood—there is an awful sense of humour—a laughter (unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all incongruities, the incongruity of Fate's game with man. I apologised to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.

'What an extraordinary idea!' said the old lady, in the conciliatory tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone with her in a railway carriage. 'I mean he was very eccentric, wasn't he?'

'Who shall say, madam? "Bold is the donkey-driver and bold the ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."'

At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered another, and I was left alone.

My intention was to take up my residence at the cottage where Winifred had lived with her aunt. Indeed, for a few days I did this, taking with me one of the Welsh peasants with whom I had previously made friends. But of course a lengthened stay in such a house was impossible. More than ever now I needed attendance, and good attendance, for I had passed into a strange state of irritability—I had no command over my nerves, which were jarred by the most trifling thing. I went to the hotel at Peri y Gwryd, but there tourists and visitors made life more intolerable still to a man in my condition.

At first I thought of building a house as near to the cottage as possible; but this would take time, and I could not rest out of Wales. I decided at last to have a wooden bungalow built. By telling the builders that time was the first consideration with me, the cost a secondary one, I got a bungalow built in a few weeks. By the tradesmen of Chester I got it fitted up and furnished to my taste with equal rapidity. Attending to this business gave real relief.

When the bungalow was finished I removed into it the picture 'Faith and Love.' I also got in as much painting material as I might want and began to make sketches in the neighbourhood.

Time went on, and there I remained. In a great degree, however, the habit of grieving was conquered by my application to work. My moroseness of temper gradually left me.

Beautiful memories began to take the place of hideous ones—the picture of the mattress and the squalor gave place to pictures of Winifred on the sands of Raxton or on Snowdon. Yet so much of habit is there in grief that even at this time I was subject to recurrent waves of the old pain—waves which were sometimes as overmastering as ever.

I did not neglect the cottage, which was now my property, but kept it in exactly the same state as that in which it had been put by Sinfi after Winnie had wandered back to Wales.

By isolating myself from all society, by surrounding myself with mementos of Winifred, memory really did at last seem to be working a miracle such as was worked for the widowed Ja'afar.

Yet not entirely had memory passed into an objective presence. I seemed to feel Winnie near me; but that was all. I felt that more necessary than anything else in perfecting the atmosphere of memory in which I would live was the society of her in whom alone I had found sympathy—Sinfi Lovell. Did I also remember the wild theories of my father and Fenella Stanley about the crwth? To obtain the company of Sinfi had now become very difficult—her attitude towards me had so changed. When she allowed me to rejoin the Lovells at Kingston Vale she did so under the compulsion of my distress. But my leaving the Gypsies of my own accord left her free from this compulsion. She felt that she had now at last bidden me farewell for ever.

Still, opportunities of seeing her occasionally would, I knew, present themselves, and I now determined to avail myself of these. Panuel Lovell and some of the Boswells were not unfrequently in the neighbourhood, and they were always accompanied by Sinfi and Videy.

II

On a certain occasion, when I learnt that the Lovells were in the neighbourhood, I sought them out. Sinfi at first was extremely shy, or distant, or proud, or scared, and it was not till after one or two interviews that she relaxed. She still was overshadowed by some mysterious feeling towards me that seemed at one moment anger, at another dread. However, I succeeded at last. I persuaded Panuel and his daughters to leave their friends at 'the Place,' and spend a few days with me at the bungalow. Great was the gaping and wide the grinning among the tourists to see me inarching along the Capel Curig road with three Gypsies. But to all human opinion I had become as indifferent as Wilderspin himself.

As we walked along the road, Sinfi slowly warmed into her old self, but Videy, as usual, was silent, preoccupied, and meditative. When we got within sight of the bungalow, however, the lights flashing from the windows made the long low building look very imposing. Pharaoh, the bantam cock which Sinfi was carrying, began to crow, but silence again fell upon Sinfi.

Panuel, when we entered the bungalow, said he was very tired and would like to go to bed. I had perceived by the glossy appearance of his skin (which was of the colour of beeswaxed mahogany) and the benevolent dimple in his check that, although far from being intoxicated, he was 'market-merry'; and as the two sisters also seemed tired, I took the party at once to their bedrooms.

'Dordi! what a gran' room,' said Sinfi, in a hushed voice, as I opened the door of the one allotted to her. 'Don't you mind, Videy, when you an' me fust slep' like two kairengros?' [Footnote]

[Footnote: House-dwellers.]

'No, I don't,' said Videy sharply.

'It was at Llangollen Fair,' continued Sinfi, her frank face beaming like a great child's; 'two little chavies we was then. An' don't you mind, Videy, how we both on us cried when they put us to bed, 'cause we was afeard the ceilin' would fall down on us?'

Videy made no answer, but tossed up her head and looked around to see whether there was a grinning servant within earshot.

'Good-night, Sinfi,' I said, shaking her hand; 'and now, Videy, I will show you your room.'

'Oh, but Videy an' me sleeps togither, don't we?'

'Certainly, if you wish it,' I replied.

'She's afeard o' the "mullos,"' said Videy scornfully, as she went and stood before an old engraved Venetian mirror I had picked up at Chester, admiring her own perfect little figure reflected therein. 'Ever since she's know'd you she's bin afeard o' mullos, and keeps Pharaoh with her o' nights; the mullos never come where there's a crowin' cock.'

I did not look at Sinfi, but bent my eyes upon the mirror, where, several inches above the reflex of Videy's sarcastic face, shone the features of Sinfi, perfectly cut as those of a Greek statue.

'It's the dukkerin' dook [Footnote] as she's afeard on,' said Videy, smiling in the glass till her face seemed one wicked glitter of scarlet lips and pearly teeth. 'An' yit there ain't no dukkerin' dook, an' there ain't no mullos.'

[Footnote: The prophesying ghost.]

Among the elaborately-engraved flowers and stars at the top of the mirror was the representation of an angel grasping a musical instrument.

'Look, look!' said Sinfi, 'I never know'd afore that angels played the crwth. I wonder whether they can draw a livin' mullo up to the clouds, same as my crwth can draw one to Snowdon?'

I bade them good-night, and joined Panuel at the door.

I was conducting him along the corridor to his room when the door was reopened and Sinfi's head appeared, as bright as ever, and then a beckoning hand.

'Reia,' said she, when I had returned to the door, 'I want to whisper a word in your ear'; and she pulled my head towards the door and whispered, 'Don't tell nobody about that 'ere jewelled trúshul in the church vaults at Raxton. We shall be going down there at the fair time, so don't tell nobody.'

'But you surely are not afraid of your father,' I whispered in reply.

'No, no,' said she, bringing her lips so close to my face that I felt the breath steaming round my ear. 'Not daddy—Videy!—Daddy can't keep a secret for five minutes. It's her I'm afeared on.'

I had scarcely left the door two yards behind me when I heard the voices of the sisters in loud altercation. I heard Sinfi exclaim, 'I sha'n't tell you what I said to him, so now! It was somethin' atween him an' me.'

'There they are ag'in,' said Panuel, bending his head sagely round and pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the door; 'at it ag'in! Them two chavies o' mine are allus a-quarrellin' now, an' it's allus about the same thing. 'Tain't the quarrellin' as I mind so much,—women an' sparrows, they say, must cherrup an' quarrel,—but they needn't allus keep a-nag-naggin' about the same thing.'

'What's their subject, Panuel?' I asked.

'Subjick? Why you, in course. That's what the subjick is. When women quarrels you may allus be sure there's a chap somewheres about.'

By this time we had entered his bedroom: he went and sat upon the bed, and without looking round him began unlacing his 'highlows.' I had often on previous occasions remarked that Panuel, who, when sober, was as silent as Videy, and looked like her in the face, became, the moment that he passed into 'market-merriness,' as frank and communicative as Sinfi, and (what was more inexplicable) looked as much like Sinfi as he had previously looked like Videy.

'How can I be the subject of their quarrels?' I said, listlessly enough, for I scarcely at first followed his words.

'How? Ain't you a chap?'

'Undoubtedly, Panuel, I am a chap.'

'When women quarrels there's allus a chap somewheres about, in course there is. But look ye here, Mr. Aylwin, the fault ain't Sinfi's, not a bit of it. It's Videy's, wi' her dog-in-the-manger ways. She's a back-bred un,' he said, giving me a knowing wink as he pulled off his calf-skin waistcoat and tossed it on to a chair at the further end of the room with a certainty of aim that would have been marvellous, even had he been entirely free from market-merriness.

I had before observed that Panuel when market-merry always designated
Videy the 'back-bred un, that took a'ter Shuri's blazin' ole dad!'
When sober his views of heredity changed; the 'back-bred un' was
Sinfi.

After breakfast next morning it was agreed that Panuel and Videy should walk to the Place to see that everything was going on well, while Sinfi and I should remain in the bungalow. I observed from the distance that Videy had loitered behind her father on the Capel Curig road. I saw a dark shadow of anger pass over Sinfi's face, and I soon understood what was causing it. The daughter of the well-to-do Panuel Lovell and my guest was accosting a tourist with, 'Let me tell you your fortune, my pretty gentleman. Give the poor Gypsy a sixpence for luck, my gentleman.'

The bungalow delighted Sinfi. 'It's just like a great livin'-waggin, only more comfortable,' said she.

We spent the entire morning and afternoon there, and much of the next two days. It certainly seemed to me that her mere presence was an immense stimulus to memory in vitalising its one image.

'What's the use o' us a-keepin' a-talkin' about Winnie?' Sinfi said to me one day. 'It on'y makes you fret. You skears me sometimes; for your eyes are a-gettin' jis' as sad-lookin' as Mr. D'Arcy's eyes, an' it's all along o' fret-tin'.'

I persuaded her to stay with me while Panuel and Videy went on to
Chester, for she could both soothe and amuse me.

III

Those who might suppose that Sinfi Lovell's lack of education would be a barrier against our sympathy, know little or nothing of real sorrow—little or nothing of the human heart—little or nothing of the stricken soul that looks out on man and his conventions through the light of an intolerable pain.

I now began to read and study as well as paint. But so absorbed was I in my struggle with Fenella Stanley and Romany superstitions, that the only subject which could distract me from memory was that of hereditary influence—prepotency of transmission in relation to races. Though Sinfi could neither read nor write, she loved to sit by my side and, caressing Pharaoh, to watch me as I read or wrote. To her there evidently seemed something mysterious and uncanny in writing, something like 'penning dukkering.' It seemed to her, I think, a much more remarkable accomplishment than that of painting. And as to reading, I am not sure that the satirical Videy was entirely wrong in saying that Sinfi believed that books 'could talk jis' like men and women.' Not a word would she speak, save when she now and then bent down her head to whisper to Pharaoh when that little warrior was inclined to give a disturbing chuckle, or to shake his wattles. And when at last she and Pharaoh got wearied by the prolonged silence, she would begin to murmur in a tone of playful satire to the restless bird, 'Mum, mum, Pharaoh. He's too hoot of a mush to rocker a choori chavi.' [Hush, hush, Pharaoh. He's too proud to speak to a poor child.]

Of course there was immense curiosity about my life at the bungalow, not only among the visitors at the Capel Curig Hotel, but among the Welsh residents; and rarely did the weekly papers come out without some paragraph about me. As a result of this, some of the London papers reproduced the paragraphs, and built upon their gossip columns of a positively offensive nature. In a paper which I will for convenience call the London Satirist appeared a paragraph which some one cut out of the columns of the paper and posted to me. It ran thus:

'THE ECCENTRIC AYLWINS.—The power of heredity, which has much exercised the mind of Balzac, has never been more strikingly exemplified than in the case of the great family of the Aylwins. It is matter of common knowledge that some generations ago one of the Aylwins married a Gypsy. This fact did not, however, prevent his branch from being respectable, and receiving the name of the proud Aylwins; and the Gypsy blood remained entirely in abeyance until the present generation. Mr. Percy Aylwin, it will be remembered, having been smitten by the charms of a certain Rhona Boswell, actually set up a tent with the Gypsies; and now Mr. Henry Aylwin, of Raxton Hall (who, by the bye, has never been seen in that neighbourhood since the great landslip), is said to be following a good example by living in Wales with a Gypsy wife, but whether the wedding took place at St. George's, Hanover Square, or in simpler fashion in an encampment of Little Egypt, we do not know.'

One day in the bungalow, when I was reading the copious marginalia with which my father had furnished his own copy of The Veiled Queen, I came upon a passage which so completely carried my mind back to the night of our betrothal that I heard as plainly as I had then heard Winnie's words at the door of her father's cottage:

'I should have to come in the winds and play around you in the woods. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went. I should have to beset you till you said: "Bother Winnie, I wish she'd keep in heaven!"'

The written words of my father that had worked this magical effect upon me were these:

'But after months of these lonely wanderings in Graylingham Wood and along the sands, not even the reshaping power of memory would suffice to appease my longing; a new hope, wild as new, was breaking in upon my soul, dim and yet golden, like the sun struggling through a sea-fog. While wandering with me along the sands on the eve of that dreadful day when I lost her, she had declared that even in heaven she could not rest without me, nor did I understand how she could. For by this time my instincts had fully taught me that there is a kind of love so intense that no power in the universe—not death itself—is strong enough to sever it from its object. I knew that although true spiritual love, as thus understood, scarcely exists among Englishmen, and even among Englishwomen is so rare that the capacity for feeling it is a kind of genius, this genius was hers. Sooner or later I said to myself, "She will and must manifest herself!"'

I looked up from the book and saw both Sinfi and Pharaoh gazing at me.

'Sinfi,' I said, 'what were Winnie's favourite places among the hills? Where was she most in the habit of roaming when she stayed with your people?'

'If I ain't told you that often enough it's a pity, brother,' she said. 'What do you think, Pharaoh?'

Pharaoh expressed his acquiescence in the satire by clapping his wings and crowing at me contemptuously.

'The place I think she liked most of all wur that very pool where she and you breakfasted together on that morning.'

'Were there no other favourite places?'

'Yes, there wur the Fairy Glen; she wur very fond of that. And there wur the Swallow Falls; she wur very fond of them. And there wur a place on the Beddgelert pathway, up from the Carnarvon road, about two miles from Beddgelert. There is a great bit of rock there where she used to love to sit and look across towards Anglesey. And talking about that place reminds me, brother, that our people and the Boswells and a lot more are camped on the Carnarvon road just where the pathway up Snowdon begins. And I wur told yesterday by a 'quaintance of mine as I seed outside the bungalow that daddy and Videy had joined them. Shouldn't we go and see 'em?'

This exactly fitted in with the thoughts and projects that had suddenly come to me, and it was arranged that we should start for the encampment next morning.

As we were leaving the bungalow the next day, I said to Sinfi, 'You are not taking your crwth.'

'Crwth! we sha'n't want that.'

'Your people are very fond of music, you know. Your father is very fond of a musical tea.'

'So he is. I'll take it,' said Sinfi.

IV

When we reached the camping-place on the Carnarvon road we found a very jolly party. Panuel had had some very successful dealings, and he was slightly market-merry. He said to Videy, 'Make the tea, Vi, and let Sinfi hev' hern fust, so that she can play on the Welsh fiddle while the rest on us are getting ourn. It'll seem jist like Chester Fair with Jim Burton scrapin' in the dancin' booth to heel and toe.'

Sinfi soon finished her tea, and began to play some merry dancing airs, which set Rhona Boswell's limbs twittering till she spilt her tea in her lap. Then, laughing at the catastrophe, she sprang up saying, 'I'll dance myself dry,' and began dancing on the sward.

After tea was over the party got too boisterous for Sinfi's taste, and she said to me, 'Let's slip away, brother, and go up the pathway, and I'll show you Winnie's favourite place.'

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 cân 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.

'Ilyàs 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 THÉÂTRE

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 débris, 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 débris 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 débris 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.'

'The mouth, Winnie? Describe that, and then I need not ask you his name, though perhaps you don't know it yourself.'

'A dark brown moustache covered the mouth. I have always thought that a mouth is unattractive if the lips are so close to the teeth that they seem to stick to them; and yet what a kind woman Mrs. Shales is, and her mouth is of this kind. But, on the other hand, where the space between the teeth and the lips is too great no mouth can be called beautiful, I think. Now though the mouth of the gentleman was not ill-cut, the lips were too far from the teeth, I thought; they were too loose, a little baggy, in short. And when he laughed—'

'What about that, Winnie? I specially want to know about his laugh.'

'Then I will tell you. When he laughed his teeth were a little too much seen; and this gave the mouth a somewhat satirical expression.'

'Winnie,' I said, 'there is no need now for you to tell me the name of the gentleman. In a few sentences you have described him better than I could have done in a hundred.'

'And certainly there is no reason why I should not tell you his name,' she said, laughing, 'for if there is a word that is musical in my ears, it is the name of him whose voice is music—D'Arcy. When he told me that I should know everything in time, and that there was nothing for me to know except that which would give me comfort, and said, "You confide in me!" I could only answer, "Who would not confide in you? I will wait patiently until you tell me what you have to tell." "Then," said he, "the best thing you can do is to lie down for an hour or two on that divan and rest yourself, and go to sleep if you can, while I go and attend to certain affairs that need me." He then left the room. I was glad to be alone, for I was terribly tired. I felt as though I had been taking violent bodily exercise, but without feeling the staying power that Snowdon air can give. I lay down on the divan, and must have fallen asleep immediately. When I woke I found the same kind face near me, and the same kind eyes watching me. Mr. D'Arcy told me that I had been sleeping for two hours, and that it had, he hoped, much refreshed me. He told me also that he took a constitutional walk every day, and asked me if I would accompany him. I said, "Yes, I should like to do so." At this moment there passed the window some railway men leaving some luggage. On seeing them Mr. D'Arcy said, "I see that I must leave you for a minute or two to look after a package of canvases that has just come from my assistant in London," and he left me. When I was left alone I had an opportunity of observing the room. The walls were covered with old faded tapestry, so faded indeed that its general effect was that of a dull grey texture. On looking at it closely I found that it told the story of Samson. Every piece of furniture seemed to me to be a rare curiosity.'

'Now, Winnie,' I said, 'I am not going to interrupt you any more. I want to hear your story as an unbroken narrative.'

IV

'Well,' said Winnie, 'after a while Mr. D'Arcy returned and told me that he was now ready to take me for a stroll across the meadows, saying, "The doctor told me that, at first, your walks must be short; so while you go to your room I will get Mrs. Titwing in for my usual consultation about our frugal meal."

'"My room," I said, "my room, and Mrs. Titwing; who's—"

'"Ha! I quite forgot myself," he said, with an air of vexation, which he tried, I thought, to conceal. "I will ring for Mrs. Titwing—the housekeeper—and she will take you to your room."

'He walked towards the bell, but before reaching it he stopped as if arrested by a sudden thought. Then he said, "I will go to the housekeeper's room and speak to Mrs. Titwing there. I shall be back in a minute." And he passed from the room through the door by which he and I had first entered.

'Scarcely had the door closed behind him before a woman entered by another door opposite to it. She was about the common height, slender, and of an extremely youthful figure for a woman of middle age. Her bright-complexioned face, lit by two watery blue eyes, was pleasant to look upon. It was none the less pleasant because it showed clearly that she was as guileless as a child.

'I knew at once that she was the person—the housekeeper—that Mr. D'Arcy had gone to seek at the other side of the house. Evidently she had come upon me unexpectedly, for she gave a violent start, then she murmured to herself,

'"So it's all over, and all went off well." she said. Then she walked quietly towards me and threw her arms round me and kissed me, saying, "Dear child, I am so glad."

'The tone of voice in which she spoke to me was exactly that of a nurse speaking to a little child.

'I was so taken by surprise that I pulled myself from her embrace with some force. The poor woman looked at me in a hurt way and then said,

'"I beg your pardon, miss. I didn't notice at first how—how changed you are. The look in your eyes makes me feel that you are not the same person, and that I have done quite wrong."

'While she was speaking, Mr. D'Arcy had re-entered the room by the door by which he went out. He had evidently heard the housekeeper's words.

'"Miss Wynne," he said, "this is Mrs. Titwing, my excellent housekeeper. She has been attending you during your illness; but your weakness was so great that you were unconscious of all her kindness."

'I went up to her and kissed her rosy cheek, at which she began to cry a little. I afterwards found that she was in the habit of crying a little on most occasions.

'"Will you, then, kindly show me my room?" I said to her. But as she turned round to lead the way to the room, Mr. D'Arcy said to her,

'"Before you show Miss Wynne the way, I should like one word with you, Mrs. Titwing, in your room, about the arrangements for the day."

'The two passed out of the room, and again I was left to myself and my own thoughts.'

V

'Evidently there was some mystery about me,' said Winifred, continuing her story. 'But the more I tried to think it out the more puzzling it seemed. How had I been conveyed to this strange new place? Who was the wizard whose eyes and whose voice began to enslave me? and what time had passed since he caught me up on Raxton sands? It seemed exactly like one of those Arabian Nights stories which you and I used to read together when we were children. The waking up on the couch, the sight of the end of the other couch behind the screen, and the tall woman's feet upon it, the voices from unseen persons in the room, and above all the strange magic of him who seemed to be the directing genie of the story—all would have seemed to me unreal had it not been for the prosaic figure of Mrs. Titwing. About her there could not possibly be any mystery; she was what Miss Dalrymple would have called "the very embodiment of British commonplace," and when, after a minute or two, she returned with Mr. D'Arcy, I went and kissed her again from sheer delight of feeling the touch of her real, solid; commonplace cheek, and to breathe the commonplace smell of scented soap. Her bearing, however, towards me had become entirely changed since she had gone out of the room. She did not return the kiss, but said, "Shall I show you the way, miss?" and led the way out.

'She took me through the same dark passage by which I had entered, and then I found myself in a large bedroom with low panelled walls, in the middle of which was a vast antique bedstead made of black carved oak, and every bit of furniture in the room seemed as old as the bedstead. Over the mantelpiece was an old picture in a carved oak frame, a Madonna and Child, the beauty of which fascinated me. I remember that on the bottom of the frame was written in printed letters the name "Chiaro dell' Erma." I was surprised to find in the room another walking-dress, not new, but slightly worn, laid out ready for me to put on. I lifted it up and looked at it. I saw at a glance that it would most likely fit me like a glove.

'"Whose dress is this?" I said.

'"It's yours, miss."

'"Mine? But how came it mine?"

'"Oh, please don't ask me any questions, miss," she said. "Please ask Mr. D'Arcy, miss; he knows all about it. I am only the housekeeper, miss."

'"Mr. D'Arcy knows all about my dress!" I said. "Why, what on earth has Mr. D'Arcy to do with my dress?"

'"Please don't ask me any more questions, miss," she said. "Pray don't. Mr. D'Arcy is a very kind man; I am sure nobody has ever heard me say but what he is a very kind man; but if you do what he says you are not to do, if you talk about what he says you are not to talk about, he is frightful, he is awful. He calls you a chattering old—I don't know what he won't call you. And, of course, I know you are a lady, miss. Of course you look a lady, miss, when you are dressed like one. But then, you see, when I first saw you, you were not dressed as you are now, and at first sight, of course, we go by the dress a good deal, you know. But Mr. D'Arcy needn't be afraid I shall not treat you like a lady, miss. I'm only a housekeeper now, though, of course, I was once very different—very different indeed. But, of course, anybody has only to look at you to see you are a lady, and, besides, Mr. D'Arcy says you are a lady, and that is quite enough."

'At this moment there came through the door—it was ajar—Mr. D'Arcy's voice from the distance, so loud and clear that every word could be heard.

'"Mrs. Titwing, why do you stay chattering there, preventing Miss Wynne from getting ready? You know we are going out for a walk together."

'"Oh Lord, miss!" said the poor woman in a frightened tone, "I must go. Tell him I didn't chatter—tell him you asked me questions and I was obliged to answer them."

'The mysteries around me were thickening every moment. What did this prattling woman mean about the dress in which she had at first seen me? Was the dress in which she had first seen me so squalid that it had affected her simple imagination? What had become of me after I had sunk down on Raxton sands, and why was I left neglected by every one? I knew you were ill after the landslip, but Mr. D'Arcy had just told me that you had since been well enough to go to Wales and afterwards to Japan.

'I put on the dress and soon followed her. When I reached the tapestried room there was Mr. D'Arcy talking to her in a voice so gentle, tender, and caressing, that it seemed impossible the rough voice I had heard bellowing through the passage could have come from the same mouth, and Mrs. Titwing was looking into his face with the delighted smile of a child who was being forgiven by its father for some trifling offence. As I stood and looked at them I said to myself, "Truly I am in a land of wonders."'

VI

'Mr. D'Arcy and I,' said Winifred, 'went out of the house at the back, walked across a roughly paved stable-yard, and passed through a gate and entered a meadow. Then we walked along a stream about as wide as one of our Welsh brooks, but I found it to be a backwater connected with a river. For some time neither of us spoke a word. He seemed lost in thought, and my mind was busy with what I intended to say to him, for I was fully determined to get some light thrown upon the mystery.

'When we reached the river bank we turned towards the left, and walked until we reached a weir, and there we sat down upon a fallen willow tree, the inside of which was all touchwood. Then he said,

'"You are silent, Miss Wynne."

'"And you are silent," I said.

'"My silence is easily explained," he said. "I was waiting to hear some remark fall from you as to these meadows and the river, which you have seen so often."

'"Which I see now for the first time, you mean."

'"Miss Wynne," he said, looking earnestly in my face, "you and I have taken this walk together nearly every day for months."

'"That," I said, "is—is quite impossible."

'"It is true," he said. And then again we sat silent.

'Then I said to him with great firmness, "Mr. D'Arcy, I'm only a peasant girl, but I'm Welsh; I have faith in you, faith in your goodness and faith in your kindness to me; but I must insist upon knowing how I came here, and how you and I were brought together."

'He smiled, and said, "I was right in thinking that your face expresses a good deal of what we call character. I should have preferred waiting for a day or two before relating all I have to tell," he said, "in answer to what you ask, but as you insist upon having it now," with a playful kind of smile, "it would be ill-bred for me to insist that you must wait. But before I begin, would it not be better if you were to tell me something of what occurred to yourself when you were taken ill at Raxton?"

'"Then will your story begin where mine breaks off?" I said.

'"We shall see that," he said, "as soon as you have ended yours."

'"Do you know Raxton?" I said.

'At first he seemed to hesitate about his reply, and then said,

'"No, I do not."

'I then told him in as few words as I could our adventures on the sands on the night of the landslip, and my search for my father's body afterwards, until I suddenly sank down in a fit. When I had finished Mr. D'Arcy was silent, and was evidently lost in thought. At last he said,

'"My story, I perceive, cannot begin where yours breaks off. I first became acquainted with you in the studio of a famous painter named Wilderspin, one of the noblest-minded and most admirable men now breathing, but a great eccentric."

'"Why, Mr. D'Arcy, I never was in a studio in my life until to-day,"
I said.

'"You mean, Miss Wynne, that you were not consciously there," he said. "But in that studio you certainly were, and the artist, who reverenced you as a being from another world, was painting your face in a beautiful picture. While he was doing this you were taken seriously ill, and your life was despaired of. It was then that I brought you into the country, and here you have been living and benefiting by the kind services of Mrs. Titwing for a long time."

'"And you know nothing of my history previously to seeing me in the
London studio?" I asked.

'"All that I could ever learn about that," said he, in what seemed to me a rather evasive tone, "I had to gather from the incoherent and rambling talk of Wilderspin, a religious enthusiast whose genius is very nearly akin to mania. He was so struck by you that he actually believed you to be not a corporeal woman at all; he believed you had been sent from the spirit-world by his dead mother to enable him to paint a great picture."

'"Oh, I must see him, and make him tell me all," I said.

'"Yes," said he, "but not yet."

'What Mr. D'Arcy told me,' said Winnie, 'affected me so deeply that I remained silent for a long time. Then came a thought which made me say,

'"You. too, are a painter, Mr. D'Arcy?"

'"Yes," he said.

'"During the months that I have been living here have you used me as your model?"

'"No; but that was not because I did not wish to do so."

'Then he suddenly looked in my face and said,

'"Is your family entirely Welsh, Miss Wynne?"

'"Entirely," I said. "But why did you not use me as your model, Mr.
D'Arcy?"

'"Poor Wilderspin believed you to be a spiritual body," he said; "I did not. I knew that you were a young lady in an unconscious condition. To have painted you in such a condition and without the possibility of getting your consent would have been sacrilege, even if I had painted you as a Madonna."

'I could not speak, his words and tone were so tender. He broke the silence by saying,

'"Miss Wynne, there is one thing in connection with you that puzzles me very much. You speak of yourself as though you were a kind of Welsh peasant girl, and yet your conversation—well, I mustn't tell you what I think of that."

'This made me laugh outright, for ladies who called on Miss Dalrymple used to make the same remark.

'"Mr. D'Arcy," I said, "you are harbouring the greatest little impostor in the British Islands. I am the mere mocking-bird of one of the most cultivated women living. My true note is that of a simple Welsh bird."

'"A Welsh warbler," he said, with a smile, "but who was the original of the impostor?"

'"Miss Dalrymple," I said.

'"Miss Dalrymple, the writer!—why I knew her years ago—before you were born."

'Our talk had been so lively that we had not noticed the passage of time, nor had we noticed that the clouds had been gathering for a summer shower. Suddenly the rain fell heavily; although we ran to the house, we were quite wet by the time we got in.

'We found poor Mrs. Titwing in a great state of excitement on account of the rain, and also because the dinner had been waiting for nearly an hour. That scamper in the rain, and the laughing and joking at our predicament, seemed to bring us closer together than anything else could have done. Mr. D'Arcy told Mrs. Titwing to take me to my room to change my dress for dinner, and he seemed quite disappointed when I told him that I could eat no dinner, and would like to retire to my room for the night. The fact was that the events of that wonderful day had exhausted all my powers; every nerve within me seemed crying out for sleep.

'I went to my room, dismissed Mrs. Titwing, and went to bed at once. But no sooner had I got into bed than I began to perceive that, instead of sleep, a long wakeful night was before me. Mr. D'Arcy's story about finding me in a London studio took entire possession of my mind. How did I get there? Where had I been and what had been my adventures before I got there? Why did the painter, in whose studio Mr. D'Arcy found me, believe that I had been super-naturally sent to him? I shuddered as a thousand dreadful thoughts flowed into my mind. "Mr. D'Arcy," I said to myself, "must know more than he has told me." Then, of course, came thoughts about you. I wondered why you had allowed me to drift away from you in this manner. True, I was probably removed from Raxton immediately after my illness, when you were very ill, as I knew; but then you had recovered!'

VII

When Winifred reached this point in her story, I said,

'And so you wondered what had become of me from your last seeing me down to your waking up in Mr. D'Arcy's house?'

'Yes, yes, Henry. Do tell me what you were doing all that time.'

As she said these words the whole tragedy of my life returned to me in one moment, and yet in that moment I lived over again every dreadful incident and every dreadful detail. The spectacle on the sands, the search for her in North Wales, the meeting in the cottage, the frightful sight as she leapt away from me on Snowdon, the heart-breaking search for her among the mountains, the sound of her voice, singing by the theatre portico in the rain, the search for her in the hideous London streets, the scenes in the studios, the soul-blasting drama in Primrose Court—all came upon me in such a succession of realities that the beautiful radiant creature now talking to me seemed impossible except as a figure in a dream. And she was asking me to tell her what I had been doing during all these months of nightmare. But I knew that I never could tell her, either now or at any future time. I knew that to tell her would be to kill her.

'Winnie,' I said, 'I will tell you all about myself, but I must hear your story first. The faster you get on with that the sooner you will hear what I have to tell.'

'Then I will get on fast,' said she. 'After a while my thoughts, as I tossed in my bed, turned from the past to the future. What was the future that was lying before me? For months I had evidently been living on the charity of Mr. D'Arcy. My only excuse for having done so was that I was entirely unconscious of it; but now that I did know the relations between us I must of course end them at once. But what was I to do? Whither was I to go? Besides Miss Dalrymple, whose address I did not know, I had no friends except Sinfi Lovell and the Gypsies and a few Welsh farmers. To live upon my benefactor's generous charity now that I was conscious of it was, I felt, impossible.

'I was penniless. I had not even money to pay my railway fare to any part of England. There was only one thing for me to do—write to you. When I rose in the morning it was with the full determination to write to you at once. I had been told by Mrs. Titwing that Mr. D'Arcy always breakfasted alone in a little anteroom adjoining his bedroom, and always breakfasted late. My breakfast, she said, would be prepared in what she called the little green room. And when I left my bedroom, dressed in a morning dress that was carefully laid out for me, I found the housekeeper moving about in the passages. She conducted me to the little green room. On the walls were two looking-glasses in old black oak frames carved with knights at tilt and angels' heads hovering above them. Each frame contained two circular mirrors surrounded by painted designs telling the story of the Holy Grail. The room was furnished with quaint sofas and chairs on which beautiful little old-fashioned designs were painted. She told me that as I had not named an hour for breakfasting I should have to wait about twenty minutes.

'In one corner of the room was a rather large whatnot, on which lay one or two French novels in green and yellow paper covers and a few daily and weekly newspapers, which I went and turned over. Among them I was startled to find a paper called the Raxton Gazette. But I saw at once how it got there, for written on the margin at the top of the paper was the address, "Dr. Mivart, Wimpole Street, London." Mr. D'Arcy had told me that the gentleman whose voice I heard behind the screen was the medical man who attended to me during my illness, and it now suddenly flashed upon my mind that at Raxton there was a Dr. Mivart, though I had never seen him during my stay there. These were, no doubt, one and the same person, and some one from Raxton had posted the newspaper to the doctor's house in London.

'I looked down the columns of the paper with a very lively interest, and my eye was soon caught by a paragraph encircled by a thick blue pencil mark. It gave from a paper called the London Satirist what professed to be a long account of you, in which it was said that you were living in a bungalow in Wales with a Gypsy girl.'

When Winifred said this I forgot my promise not to interrupt her narrative, and exclaimed,

'And you believed this infamous libel, Winnie?'

'To say that I believed it as a simple statement of fact would of course be wrong. I never doubted you loved me as a child.'

'As a child! Do you then think that I did not love you that night on
Raxton sands?'

'I did not doubt that you loved me then. But wealth, I had been told, is so demoralising, and I thought your never coming forward to find me and protect me in my illness might have something to do with inconstancy. Anyhow, these thoughts combined with my dread of your mother to prevent me from writing to you.'

'Winnie, Winnie!' I said, 'these theories of the so-called advanced thinkers, whom your aunt taught you to believe in—these ideas that love and wealth cannot exist together, are prejudices as narrow and as blind as those of an opposite kind which have sapped the natures of certain members of my own family.'

'The sight of your dear sad face when I first saw it here was proof enough of that,' she said. 'As your life was said to be that of a wanderer, I did not care to write to Raxton, and I did not know where to address you. What I had read in the newspaper, I need not tell you, troubled me greatly. I cried bitterly, and made but a poor breakfast. After it was over Mr. D'Arcy entered the room, and shook me warmly by the hand. He saw that I had been crying, and he stood silent and seemed to be asking himself the cause. Drawing a chair towards me, and taking a seat, he said,

'"I fear you have not slept well, Miss Wynne."

'"Not very well," I answered. Then, looking at him, I said, "Mr. D'Arcy, I have something to say to you, and this is the moment for saying it."

'He gave a startled look, as though he guessed what I was going to say.

'"And I have something to say to you, Miss Wynne," he said, smiling, "and this seems the proper time for saying it. Up to the last few weeks a young gentleman from Oxford has been acting as my secretary. He has now left me, and I am seeking another. His duties, I must say, have not been what would generally be called severe. I write most of my own letters, though not all, and my correspondence is far from being large. His chief duty has been that of reading to me in the evening. For many years my eyes have not been so strong as a painter's ought to be, and the oculist whom I consulted told me that the strain of the painter's work was quite as much as my eyes ought to bear, and that I could not afford much eyesight for reading purposes. I am passionately fond of reading. To be without the pleasure that books can afford me would be to make me miserable, and I have looked upon my secretary's duty of reading aloud to me as an important one. If you would take his place you would be conferring the greatest service upon me."

'"Mr. D'Arcy," I said, "I suspect you."

'"Suspect me, Miss Wynne?"

'"I suspect that generous heart of yours. I suspect you are merely inventing a post for me to fill, because you pity me."

'"No, Miss Wynne; upon my honour this is not so. I will not deny that if it were not in your power to do me the service that I ask of you, I should still feel the greatest disappointment if you passed from under this roof. Your scruples about living here as you lived during your illness—simply as my guest—I understand, but do not approve. They show that you are not quite so free from the bondage of custom as I should like every friend of mine to be. The tie of friendship is, in my judgment, the strongest of all ties, stronger than that of blood, because it springs from the natural kinship of soul to soul, and there is no reason in the world why I should not offer you a home as a friend, or why, if the circumstances of our lives were reversed, you should not offer me one. But in this case it is the fact that the service I am asking you to render me is greater than any service I can render you."

'I was so deeply touched by his words and by his way of speaking them, that my lips trembled, and I could make no reply.

'"It is a shame," he said, "for me to talk about business so soon after your recovery. Let us leave the matter for the moment, and come to me in the studio during the morning, and let me show you the pictures I am painting, and some of my choice things."

'The morning wore on, and still I sat pondering over the situation in which I found myself. The servant came and removed the breakfast things, and her furtive glances at me showed that I was an object at once familiar and strange to her. But very little attention did I pay to her, in such a whirl of thoughts as I then was. The moment that one course of action seemed to me the best, the very opposite would occur to me as being the best. However, I was determined to know from Mr. D'Arcy, and at once, what was the state in which I was when I was brought to this place, and what had been the course of my life during my stay here. Mr. D'Arcy had told me that, for reasons which he so touchingly alluded to, he had not used me as a model. How, then, had my time been passed? To question poor Mrs. Titwing would only be to frighten her. I would ask Mr. D'Arcy for a full confession.

'Mrs. Titwing came into the room. She began pulling at the ribbon of her black silk apron as though she wanted to speak and could not find the proper words. At last she said,

'"I hope, miss, there have been no words between you and Mr. D'Arcy?"

''"Words between me and Mr. D'Arcy? What do you mean?" I asked.

'"He seems very much upset, miss, about something. He is not at his easel, but keeps walking about the studio, and every now and then he asks where you are. I'm sure he used to dote on you when you were a child, miss."

'"When I was a child?" I said, laughing. "But I see what it is. I have been very neglectful. I promised to go into the studio to see the pictures, and he is, of course, impatient at my keeping him waiting. I will go to him at once," and I went.

'When I entered the studio he turned quickly round and said,

'"Well?"

'"You were so kind," I said, "as to invite me to see your treasures."

'"To be sure," he said. "I thought you came to give your decision."

'He then showed me the curious divan upon which I had rested the day before, and explained to me the meaning of the carved designs.'

VIII

Winifred described the designs on the divan so vividly that I could almost see them. But what interested me was the painter, not his surroundings; and she now seemed to grow weary of talking about herself.

'Did he,' I said, 'did he say anything about—about painters' models?'

'Yes,' she said, 'Mr. D'Arcy took me to an easel and showed me a picture. It was only the half-length of a woman; but it was a tragedy rendered fully by the expression on one woman's face.

'"I had no idea," I said, "that any picture of a single face could do such work as that. Was this painted from a model?"

'"Yes," he said, with a smile, which was evidently at my ignorance of art. "It was painted from life."

'There were four other half-lengths in the room, all of them very beautiful.

'"Two of these," he said, "are copies; the originals have been sold.
The other two need still a few touches to make them complete."

'"And they were all painted from life?" I said.

'"Yes," he said. "Why do you repeat that question?"

'"Because," I said, "although they are all so wonderful and so beautiful in colour, I can see a great difference between them—I can scarcely say what the difference is. They are evidently all painted by the same artist, but painted in different moods of the artist's mind."

'"Ah," he said, "I am much interested. Let me see you classify them according to your view. There are, as you see, two brunettes and two blondes."

'"Yes," I said, "between this grand brunette, to use your own expression, holding a pomegranate in her hand and the other brunette whose beautiful eyes are glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up, there is the same difference that there is between the blonde's face under the apple blossoms and the other blonde's face of the figure that is listening to music. In both faces the difference seems to be that of the soul."

'"The two faces," said he, "in which you see what you call soul are painted from two dear friends of mine—ladies of high intelligence and great accomplishments, who occasionally honour me by giving me sittings—the other two are painted from two of the finest hired models to be found in London."

'"Then," I said, "an artist's success depends a great deal upon his model? I had no idea of such a thing."

'"It does indeed," he said. "Such success as I have won since my great loss is very largely owing to those two ladies, one so grand and the other so sweet, whom you are admiring."

'The way in which he spoke the words "since my great loss" almost brought tears into my eyes. He then went round the room, and explained in a delightful way the various pictures and objects of interest. I felt that I was preventing him from working, and told him so.

'"You are very thoughtful," he said, "but I can only paint when I feel the impulse within me, and to-day I am lazy. But while you go and get your luncheon—I do not lunch myself—I must try to do something. You must have many matters of your own that you would like to attend to. Will you return to the studio about five o'clock, and let me have your company in another walk?"

'Until five o'clock I was quite alone, and wandered about the house and garden trying my memory as to whether I could recall something, but in vain. At any other time than this I should no doubt have found the old house a very fascinating one; but not for two minutes together could my mind dwell upon anything but the amazing situation in which I found myself. The house was, I saw, built of grey stone, and as it had seven gables it suggested to me Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous story, of which my aunt was so fond. Inside I found every room to be more or less interesting. But what attracted me most, I think, was a series of large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams supporting the antique roof. With the sunlight pouring through the windows and illuminating almost every corner, the place seemed cheerful enough, but I could not help thinking how ghostly it must look on a moonlight night.

'While the thought was in my mind, a strangle sensation came upon me. I seemed to hear a moan; it came through the door of the large attic adjoining the one in which I stood, and then I heard a voice that seemed familiar to me, and yet I could not recall it. It was repeating in a loud, agonised tone the words of that curse written on the parchment scroll which I picked up on Raxton sands. I was so astonished that for a long time I could think of nothing else.

IX

'At five o'clock I was going towards the studio to keep my appointment when I met Mr. D'Arcy in his broad-brimmed felt hat, ready and waiting for me to take the proposed walk with him.

'Oh, what a lovely afternoon it was! A Welsh afternoon could not have been lovelier. In fact, it carried my mind back here. The sun, shining on the buttercups and the grey-tufted standing grass, made the meadows look as though covered with a tapestry that shifted from grey to lavender, and then from lavender to gold, as the soft breeze moved over it. And many of the birds were still in full song; and brilliant as was the music of the skylarks, the blackbirds and thrushes were so numerous that the music falling from the sky seemed caught and swallowed up by the music rising from the hedgerows and trees.

'I lingered at one of the gates through which we passed to enjoy the beauty undisturbed by the motion of my own body.

'"I have often wished," Mr. D'Arcy said, "that I had a tithe of your passion for Nature, and all your knowledge of Nature. To have been born in London and to have passed one's youth there is a great loss. Nature has to be learnt, as art has to be learnt, in earliest youth."

'"What makes you know that my chief passion is love of Nature?" I asked.

'"It was," he said, "the one thing you showed during your illness—during your unconscious condition."

'"And yet I remember nothing of that time," I said. "This gives me an opportunity of asking you something—an opportunity which I had determined to make for myself before another day went by."

'"And what is that?" he said, in a tone that betrayed some uneasiness.

'"You have told me how I came here. I now want you to tell me, too, what was my condition when I came and what was my course of life during all this long period. How did the time pass? What did I do? I remember nothing."

'"I am glad you are asking me these questions," he said, "for I believe that the more fully and more exactly I answer them, the better for you and the better for me. Victor Hugo, in one of his romances, speaks of the pensive somnambulism of the animals. 'Somnambulism,' sometimes pensive and sometimes playful, is the very phrase I should use in characterising your condition when you first came here and down to your recovery from that strange illness. But this somnambulism would every now and then change and pass into a consciousness which I can only compare with that of a child. But no child that I have ever seen was so bewitchingly child-like as you were. It was this that made your presence such a priceless boon to me."

'"Priceless boon, Mr. D'Arcy!" I said. "How could such a being as you describe be a priceless boon to any one?"

'"I will tell you," he replied. "Even before that great sorrow which has made me the loneliest man upon the earth—even in the days when my animal spirits were considered at times almost boisterous, I was always at intervals subject to periods of great depression, or rather, I should say, to periods of ennui. I must either be painting or reading or writing. I had not the precious faculty of being able on occasions to sit and let the rich waters of life flow over me. I would yearn for amusement, and search in vain for some object to amuse me. When you first came I was deeply interested in so extraordinary a case as yours; and after a while, when the acuteness of my curiosity and the poignancy of my sympathy for you had abated, you became to me a joy, as a child is a joy in the eyes of its parents."

'"Then your interest in me," I said, with a smile, "was that which you would feel towards a puppy or a kitten."

'"I perceive that you have a turn for satire," he said, laughing. "I will not deny that I have an extraordinarily strong passion for watching the movements of animals. I have, to the sorrow of my neighbours, filled my garden in London with all kinds of purchases from Jamrach's. But from the moment that I knew you, who combined the fascination of a fawn and a child with that of a sylph or a fairy, my poor little menagerie was neglected, and what became of its members I scarcely know. I suppose I am very uncomplimentary to you, but you would have the truth. The moment that I felt myself threatened by the fiend Ennui I used to tell Mrs. Titwing, who was in the habit of calling you her baby, to bring you into the studio, and at once the fiend fled. At last I grew so attached to you that your presence was a positive necessity of my life. Unless I knew that you were in the studio I could not paint. It was necessary for me at intervals to look across the room at that divan and see you there amusing yourself—playing with yourself, so to speak, sometimes like a kitten, sometimes like a child. I would not have parted with you for the world."

'He did not say he would not now part with me for the world, Henry, and I thought I understood the meaning of that expression of disappointment which I had observed in his eyes when I first saw them looking into mine. I thought I understood this extraordinary man—so unlike all others; I thought I knew why my eyes lost the charm he was now so eloquently describing to me the moment that they became lighted with what he called self-consciousness.

'After a while I said, "But as I was in such an unconscious state as you describe, how could you possibly know that a speciality of mine is a love of Nature?"

'"It was only when you were out in the open air that the condition which I have compared to somnambulism seemed at times to disappear. Then your consciousness seemed to spring up for a moment and to take heed of what was passing around you. You would sometimes scamper through the meadows, pluck the wild-flowers and weave them into wreaths round your head, or stand listening to the birds, or hold out your hands as if to embrace the sunny wind. One day when a friend of mine, an enthusiastic angler, who comes here, was going down to the river to fish, you showed the greatest interest in what was going on. The fishing tackle seemed so familiar to you that my friend put a fishing rod into your hand and you went with him to the river. I do not myself care for angling, and I was at the time very busy with a picture, but I could not resist the temptation to follow you. You skipped into the punt with the greatest glee, baited your hook, adjusted your float on the line, cast it into the water and fished with such skill that you caught two fish to my friend's one. Observing all these things, I came to the conclusion that you had lived much in the open air, and other incidents made me know that you were a great lover of Nature."

'"And you," I said, "must also be a lover of Nature, or you could not find such delight in watching animals."

'"No," he said, "the interest I take in animals has nothing whatever to do with love of Nature or study of Nature. They interest me by that unconsciousness of grace which makes them such a contrast to man."

'We then went into the house. Our talk during our ramble in the fields seemed to remove effectually all awkwardness and restraint between us.

X

'That day,' said Winnie, 'a determination which had been caused by many a reflection during the last few hours induced me at dinner to lead the conversation to the subject of pictures and models. In a few minutes Mr. D'Arcy launched out in an eloquent discourse upon a subject which was so new to me and so familiar to him.

'"You were saying this morning, Mr. D'Arcy," I urged me to tell her what had befallen myself since we had parted at the cottage door at Raxton. Even had it been possible for me to talk about myself without touching upon some dangerous incident or another, my impatience to get at the mystery of mysteries in connection with her and her rescue from Primrose Court was so great that I could only implore her to tell me what had occurred down to her leaving Hurstcote Manor, and also what had been the cause of her leaving.

'Well,' said Winnie, 'I am now going to tell you of an extraordinary thing that happened. One fine night the moon was so brilliant that after I quitted Mr. D'Arcy I stole out of the side door into the garden, a favourite place of mine, for old English flowers were mixed with apple trees and pear trees. I was strolling about the garden, thinking over a thousand things connected with you, and myself, and Mr. D'Arcy, when I saw stooping over a flower-bed the figure of a tall woman. I could scarcely believe my eyes, for I had all the while supposed that, excepting Mr. D'Arcy, myself, and Mrs. Titwing, the servants were the only occupants of the place. I turned away, and walked silently through the little wicket into what is called the home close. As I pondered over the incident, I recalled certain things which singly had produced no effect on my mind, but which now fitted in with each other, and seemed to open up vistas of mystery and suspicion. Mysterious looks and gestures on the faces of the servants pointed to there being some secret that was to be kept from me. I had not given much heed to these things, but now I could not help connecting them with the appearance of the tall woman in the garden.

'Some guests arrived next day, and when I pleaded headache Mr. D'Arcy said, "Perhaps you would rather keep to your own room to-day."

'I told him I should, and I spent the day alone—spent it mainly in thinking about the tall woman. In the evening I went into the garden, and remained there for a long time, but no tall woman made her appearance.

'I passed out through the wicket into the home close, and as I walked about in the grass, under the elms that sprang up from the tall hedge, I thought and thought over what I had seen, but could come to no explanation. I was standing under a tree, in the shadow which its branches made, when I became suddenly conscious that the tall woman was close to me. I turned round, and stood face to face with Sinfi Lovell. The sight of a spectre could not have startled me more, but the effect of my appearance upon her was greater still. Her face took an expression that seemed to curdle my blood, and she shrieked, "Father! the curse! Let his children be vagabonds and beg their bread; let them seek it also out of desolate places." And then she ran towards the house.

'In a few minutes Mr. D'Arcy came out into the field without his hat, and evidently much agitated.

'"Miss Wynne," he said, "I fear you must have been half frightened to death. Never was there such an unlucky contretemps."

'"But why is Sinfi Lovell here?" I said, "and why was I not told she was here?"

'"Sinfi is an old friend of mine," he said. "I have been in the habit of using her as a model for pictures. She came here to sit to me, when she was taken ill. She is subject to fits, as you have seen. The doctor believed that they were over and would not recur, and I had determined that to-morrow I would bring you together."

'I made no reply, but walked silently by his side across the field to the little wicket. The confidence I had reposed in Mr. D'Arcy had been like the confidence a child reposes in its father.

'"Miss Wynne," he said, in a voice full of emotion, "I feel that an unlucky incident has come between us, and yet if I ever did anything for your good, it was when I decided to postpone revealing the fact that Sinfi Lovell was under this roof until her cure was so complete and decisive that you could never by any chance receive the shock that you have now received."

'I felt that my resentment was melting in the music of his words.

'"What caused the fits?" I said. "She talked about being under a curse. What can it mean?"

'"That," he said, "is too long a story for me to tell you now."

'"I know," said I, "that some time ago the tomb of Mr. Aylwin's father was violated by some undiscovered miscreant, and I know that the words Sinfi uttered just now are the words of a curse written by the dead man on a piece of parchment, and stolen with a jewel from his tomb. I have seen the parchment itself, and I know the words well. Her father, Panuel Lovell, is as innocent of the crime of sacrilege as my poor father was. What could have made her suppose that she had inherited the curse from her father?"

'"I have no explanation to offer," he said. "As you know so much of the matter and I know so little, I am inclined to ask you for some explanation of the puzzle."

'I thought over the matter for a minute, and then I said to him, "Sinfi Lovell knows Raxton as well as Snowdon, and must have been very familiar with the crime. I can only suppose that she has brooded so long over the enormity of the offence and the appalling words of the curse that she has actually come at last to believe that poor, simple-minded Panuel Lovell is the offender, and that she, as his child, has inherited the curse."

'"A most admirable solution of the mystery," he said, his face beaming with delight.'