'She has,' said he, 'mesmeric power; it is only semiconscious, but it is mesmeric. She exercises it partly through her gaze and partly through her voice.'
He was still talking about Sinfi when a river-boy, who was whistling with extraordinary brilliancy and gusto, met and passed us. Not a word more of D'Arcy's talk did I hear, for the boy was whistling the very air to which Winnie used to sing the Snowdon song
I met in a glade a lone little maid
At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.
I ran after the boy and asked him what tune he was whistling.
'What tune?' he said, 'blowed if I know.'
'Where did you hear it?' I asked.
'Well, there used to be a gal, a kind of a beggar gal, as lived not far from 'ere for a little while, but she's gone away now, and she used to sing that tune. I allas remember tunes, but I never could make out anything of the words.'
D'Arcy laughed at my eccentricity in running after the boy to learn where he had got a tune. But I did not tell him why.
After we had passed some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said, 'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and Japanese statues and carvings.
My brain still rang with the air I had heard the river-boy whistling, but I felt that I must talk about something.