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.'