But she remained silent.  The conversation, I perceived, would have to be directed entirely by me.  With the appalling seizures ever present in my mind, I felt that every word that came from my lips was dangerous.

‘Look,’ I said, ’the colours of the vapours round the llyn are as rich as they were when we breakfasted here together.’

‘We breakfasted here together!  Why, what do you mean?’ she said, looking in my face.  ’You forget, Henry, you never knew me in Wales at all; it was only at Raxton that you ever saw me.’

’I mean when you breakfasted with the Prince of the Mist.  I was the Prince of the Mist, dear.’

She gave me a puzzled look which scared while it warned me.  How cruel it seemed of Sinfi, who had planned this meeting, not to have told me how much and how little Winnie knew of the past.

’You know nothing about the Prince of the Mist except what I told you on Raxton sands,’ she said.  ’But you have been very ill; you will be well now.’

‘Yes,’ I said; ’I have found the life I had lost, and these dreams of mine will soon pass.’

As the conversation went on I began to see that she remembered our meetings on the sands—­remembered everything up to a certain point.  What was that point?  This was the question that kept me on tenterhooks.

Every word she uttered, however, shed light into my mind, and served as a warning that I must feel my way cautiously.  It was evident to me that in some unaccountable way Sinfi at some time after she left me at Beddgelert had discovered that Winnie was not really dead, and had brought her back to me—­brought her back to me restored in mind, but with all memory of what had passed during her dementia erased from her consciousness.  Everything depended now upon my learning how much of her past she did remember.  A single ill-judged word of mine—­a single false move—­might ruin all, and bring back the life of misery which I seemed at last to have left behind me.

VI

‘Winnie,’ I said, ’you have not yet told me how you came here.  You have not yet told me how it is that you meet me on Snowdon—­meet me in this wonderful way.’

‘Oh,’ said she with a smile, ’Badoura has been a mere puppet in the play.  She had no idea she was going to meet her prince.  Sinfi was suddenly seized with a desire that she and I should come back, and visit the dear old places we knew together.  I was nothing loth, as you may imagine, but I could not understand what had made her set her heart upon it.  When we reached Carnarvonshire I found that Sinfi’s people were all encamped near to Bettws y Coed, and we went and stayed there.  We visited all the places in the neighbourhood that were associated with her childhood and mine.’

‘You went to Fairy Glen?’ I said.

’Yes; we went there the night before last and saw it in the moonlight.’

‘I was there, and I saw you.’