THE SONG OF Y WYDDFA
I
After this I had one or two interviews with our solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields, upon important family matters connected with my late uncle's property.
I had been one night to the theatre with my mother and my aunt. The house had been unusually crowded. When the performance was over, we found that the streets were deluged with rain. Our carriage had been called some time before it drew up, and we were standing under the portico amid a crowd of impatient ladies when a sound fell or seemed to fall on my ears which stopped for the moment the very movements of life. Amid the rattle of wheels and horses' feet and cries of messengers about carriages and cabs, I seemed to distinguish a female voice singing:
'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!'
It was the voice of Winifred singing as in a dream.
I heard my aunt say,
'Do look at that poor girl singing and holding out her little baskets! She must be crazed to be offering baskets for sale in this rain and at this time of night.'
I turned my eyes in the direction in which my aunt was looking, but the crowd before me prevented my seeing the singer.
'She is gone, vanished,' said my aunt sharply, for my eagerness to see made me rude.