I was quickly by her side, but felt as little in the mood for talking as she did.  Suddenly a small lizard glided from the grass.

‘The Romany Sap!’ cried Sinfi, and she—­the fearless woman before whom the stoutest Gypsy men had quailed—­sobbed wildly in terror.  She soon recovered herself, and said:  ’What a fool you must think me, Hal!  It wur all through talkin’ about the Romany Sap.  At fust I thought it wur the Romany Sap itself, an’ it wur only a poor little effet arter all.  There ain’t a-many things made o’ flesh and blood as can make Sinfi Lovell show the white feather; but I know you’ll think the wuss o’ me arter this, Hal.  But while the pictur were a-showin’ I heard my dear mammy’s whisper:  “Little Sinfi, little Sinfi, beware o’ Gorgios!  This is the one."’

V

By the time we reached the encampment it was quite dark.  Panuel, and indeed most of the Gypsies, had turned into the tents for the night; but both Videy Lovell and Rhona Boswell were moving about as briskly as though the time was early morning, one with guile expressed in every feature, the other shedding that aura of frankness and sweet winsomeness which enslaved Percy Aylwin, and no wonder.

Rhona was in a specially playful mood, and came dancing round us more like a child of six than a young woman with a Romany Rye for a lover.

But neither Sinfi nor I was in the mood for frolic.  My living-waggon, which still went about wherever the Lovells went, had been carefully prepared for me by Rhona, and I at once went into it, not with the idea of getting much sleep, but in order to be alone with my thoughts.  What was I to think of my experiences of that evening?  Was I really to take the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes when listening to Sinfi’s crwth, or rather when listening to her song, as evidence that Winifred was alive?  Oh, if I could, if I could!  Was I really to accept as true this fantastic superstition about the crwth and the spirits of Snowdon and the ‘living mullo’?  That was too monstrous a thought even for me to entertain.  Notwithstanding all that had passed in the long and dire struggle between my reason and the mysticism inherited with the blood of two lines of superstitious ancestors, which circumstances had conspired to foster, my reason had only been baffled and thwarted; it had not really been slain.

What, then, could be the explanation of the spectacle that had seemed to fall upon my eyes?  ‘It is hallucination,’ I said, ’and it is the result of two very powerful causes—­my own strong imagination, excited to a state of feverish exaltation by the long strain of my suffering, and that power in Sinfi which D’Arcy had described as her “half-unconscious power as a mesmerist.”  At a moment when my will, weakened by sorrow and pain, lay prostrate beneath my own fevered imagination, Sinfi’s voice, so full of intense belief in her own hallucination, had leapt, as it were, into my consciousness and enslaved my imagination, which in turn had enslaved my will and my senses.’