Awaking from this dream, I looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes, or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion, took away my breath.  Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous ’Queen of the Fair People.’

‘Never,’ I said to myself, ’was there an optical illusion so perfect.  I can see the moonlight playing upon her hair.  But the hair is not golden, as the hair of the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg should be; it is dark as Winnie’s own.’

Then the face turned and she looked at the river, and then I exclaimed ‘Winifred!’ And then Fairy Glen vanished and I was at Raxton standing by a cottage door in the moonlight.  I was listening to a voice—­that one voice to whose music every chord of life within me was set for ever, which said,

’I should have to come in the winds, and play around you on the sands.  I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you.  I should have to follow you about wherever you went.’

The sight vanished.  Although I had no doubt that what I had seen was an hallucination, when I moved farther on and stood and gazed at the stream as it went winding round the mossy cliffs to join the Lledr, I felt that Winnie was by my side, her hand in mine, and that we were children together.  And when I mounted the steps and strolled along the path that leads to the plantation where the moonlight, falling through the leaves, covered the ground with what seemed symbolical arabesques of silver and grey and purple, I felt the pressure of little fingers that seemed to express ‘How beautiful!’ And when I stood gazing through the opening in the landscape, and saw the rocks gleaming in the distance and the water down the Lledr valley, I saw the sweet young face gazing in mine with the smile of the delight that illumined it on the Wilderness Road when she discoursed of birds and the wind.

The vividness of the vision of Fairy Glen drove out for a time all other thoughts.  The livelong night my brain seemed filled with it.

       ‘My eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
       Or else worth all the rest,’

I said to myself as I lay awake.  So full, indeed, was my mind of this one subject that even Rhona’s strange message from Sinfi was only recalled at intervals.  While I was breakfasting, however, this incident came fully back to me.  Either Rhona’s chatter about Sinfi’s reason for wanting to see me was the nonsense that had floated into Rhona’s own brain, the brain of a love-sick girl to whom everything spelt marriage—­or else poor Sinfi’s mind had become unhinged.

II

As I was to sleep at the cottage, and as I knew not what part I might have to play in Sinfi’s wild frolic, I told the servants that any letters which might reach the bungalow next morning were to be sent at once to the cottage, should I not have returned thence.