'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.