'I don't stay at all; I'm coming back immediately.'
'Come,' I exclaimed, 'there's a little comfort in that, at least.
Snap and I can wait for one day.'
'Good-night,' said Winifred.
'Have you not seen the great landslip at the churchyard?' I asked, taking her hand and pointing to the new promontory which the débris of the fall had made.
'Another landslip?' said she. 'Poor dear old churchyard, it will soon all be gone! Snap and I must have been far away when that fell. But I remember saying to him, 'Hark at the thunder. Snap!' and then I heard a sound like a shriek that appalled me. It recalled a sound I once heard in Shire-Carnarvon.'
'What was it, Winnie?'
'You've heard me when I was a little girl talk of my Gypsy sister
Sinfi?'
'Often,' I said.
'She loves me more than anybody else in the whole world,' said Winifred simply. 'She says she would lay down her life for me, and I really believe she would. Well, there is not far from where I used to live a famous cascade called the Swallow Falls, where the water drops down a chasm of great depth. If you listen to the noise of the cataract, you may hear mingled with it a peculiar kind of wail as from a man in great agony. It is said to be the wail of a Sir John Wynn, of Gwydir, whose spirit is under a curse, and is imprisoned at the bottom of the falls on account of his cruelty and misdeeds on earth. On those rare nights when the full moon shines down the chasm, the wail becomes an agonised shriek. Once on a bright moonlight night Sinfi and I went to see these falls. The moonlight on the cascade had exactly the same supernatural appearance that it has now falling upon these billows. Sinfi sings some of our Welsh songs, and accompanies herself on a peculiar obsolete Welsh instrument called a crwth, which she always carries with her. While we were listening to the cataract and what she called the Wynn wail, she began to sing the wild old air. Then at once the wail sprang into a loud shriek; Sinfi said the shriek of a cursed spirit; and the shriek was exactly like the sound I heard from the cliffs a little while ago.'
'I heard the same noise, Winnie. It was simply the rending and cracking of the poor churchyard trees as they fell.'