And then there appeared in the eastern cleft of the gorge on the other side of the llyn, illuminated as by a rosy steam, Winnie!  Amid the opalescent vapours gleaming round the llyn, with eyes now shimmering as through a veil—­now flashing like sapphires in the sun—­there she stood gazing through the film, her eyes expressing a surprise and a wonder as great as my own.

‘It is no phantasm—­it is no hallucination,’ I said, while my breathing had become a spasmodic, choking gasp.

But when I remembered the vision of Fairy Glen, I said, ’Imagination can do that, and so can the glamour cast over me by Sinfi’s music.  It does not vanish; ah, if the sweet madness should remain with me for ever!  It does not vanish—­it is gliding along the side of the llyn:  it is moving towards me.  And now those sudden little ripples in the llyn—­what do they mean?  The trout are flying from her shadow.  The feet are grating on the stones.  And hark! that pebble which falls into the water with a splash; the glassy llyn is ribbed and rippled with rings.  Can a phantom do that?  It comes towards me still.  Hallucination!’

Still the vision came on.

When I felt the touch of her body, when I felt myself clasped in soft arms, and felt falling on my face warm tears, and on my lips the pressure of Winnie’s lips—­lips that were murmuring, ’At last, at last!’—­a strange, wild effect was worked within me.  The reality of the beloved form now in my arms declared itself; it brought back the scene where I had last clasped it.

Snowdon had vanished; the brilliant morning sun had vanished.  The moon was shining on a cottage near Raxton Church, and at the door two lovers were standing, wet with the sea-water—­with the sea-water through which they had just waded.  All the misery that had followed was wiped out of my brain.  It had not even the cobweb consistence of a dream.

When, after a while, Snowdon and the drama of the present came back to me, my brain was in such a marvellous state that it held two pictures of the same Winnie as though each hemisphere of the brain were occupied with its own vision.  I was kissing Winnie’s sea-salt lips in the light of the moon at the cottage door, and I was kissing them in the morning radiance by Knockers’ Llyn.  And yet so overwhelming was the mighty tide of bliss overflowing my soul that there was no room within me for any other emotion—­no room for curiosity, no room even for wonder.

Like a spirit awakening in Paradise, I accepted the heaven in which I found myself, and did not inquire how I got there.

This did not last long, however.  Suddenly and sharply the moonlight scene vanished, and I was on Snowdon, and there came a burning curiosity to know the meaning of this new life—­the meaning of the life of pain that had followed the parting at the cottage door.

V

‘Winnie,’ I said, ’tell me where we are.  I have been very ill since we parted in your father’s cottage.  I have had the wildest hallucinations concerning you; dreams, intolerable dreams.  And even now they hang about me; even now it seems to me that we are far away from Raxton, surrounded by the hills and peaks of Snowdon.  If they were real you would be the dream, but you are real; this waist is real.’