I persuaded her to stay with me while Panuel and Videy went on to Chester, for she could both soothe and amuse me.

III

Those who might suppose that Sinfi Lovell’s lack of education would be a barrier against our sympathy, know little or nothing of real sorrow—­little or nothing of the human heart—­little or nothing of the stricken soul that looks out on man and his conventions through the light of an intolerable pain.

I now began to read and study as well as paint.  But so absorbed was I in my struggle with Fenella Stanley and Romany superstitions, that the only subject which could distract me from memory was that of hereditary influence—­prepotency of transmission in relation to races.  Though Sinfi could neither read nor write, she loved to sit by my side and, caressing Pharaoh, to watch me as I read or wrote.  To her there evidently seemed something mysterious and uncanny in writing, something like ‘penning dukkering.’  It seemed to her, I think, a much more remarkable accomplishment than that of painting.  And as to reading, I am not sure that the satirical Videy was entirely wrong in saying that Sinfi believed that books ’could talk jis’ like men and women.’  Not a word would she speak, save when she now and then bent down her head to whisper to Pharaoh when that little warrior was inclined to give a disturbing chuckle, or to shake his wattles.  And when at last she and Pharaoh got wearied by the prolonged silence, she would begin to murmur in a tone of playful satire to the restless bird, ’Mum, mum, Pharaoh.  He’s too hoot of a mush to rocker a choori chavi.’ [Hush, hush, Pharaoh.  He’s too proud to speak to a poor child.]

Of course there was immense curiosity about my life at the bungalow, not only among the visitors at the Capel Curig Hotel, but among the Welsh residents; and rarely did the weekly papers come out without some paragraph about me.  As a result of this, some of the London papers reproduced the paragraphs, and built upon their gossip columns of a positively offensive nature.  In a paper which I will for convenience call the London Satirist appeared a paragraph which some one cut out of the columns of the paper and posted to me.  It ran thus: 

’THE ECCENTRIC AYLWINS.—­The power of heredity, which has much exercised the mind of Balzac, has never been more strikingly exemplified than in the case of the great family of the Aylwins.  It is matter of common knowledge that some generations ago one of the Aylwins married a Gypsy.  This fact did not, however, prevent his branch from being respectable, and receiving the name of the proud Aylwins; and the Gypsy blood remained entirely in abeyance until the present generation.  Mr. Percy Aylwin, it will be remembered, having been smitten by the charms of a certain Rhona Boswell, actually set up a tent with the Gypsies; and now Mr. Henry Aylwin, of Raxton Hall (who, by the bye, has never been seen in that neighbourhood since the great landslip), is said to be following a good example by living in Wales with a Gypsy wife, but whether the wedding took place at St. George’s, Hanover Square, or in simpler fashion in an encampment of Little Egypt, we do not know.’