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.