I closed the door, and we resumed our seats.

Can I put into words what passed within my soul as we two sat by the fire, she holding my hand in her own—­holding it as innocently as a child holds the hand of its mother?  Can I put into words my mingled feelings of love and pity and wild grief, as I sat looking at her and murmuring, ’Yes; if God will only give her to me like this, I will be content’?

‘Prince,’ said she, ‘your eyes look very kind!—­Sweet, sweet eyes,’ she continued, looking at me.  ‘The Prince of the Mist has love-eyes,’ she repeated, as she placed the seats before the fire again.

Then I heard her murmur, ‘Love-eyes! love-eyes!  Henry’s love-eyes!’ Then a terrible change came over her.  She sprang up and came and peered in my face.  An indescribable expression of terror overspread her features, her nostrils expanded, her lips were drawn tightly over her teeth, her eyes seemed starting from their sockets; her throat suddenly became fluted like the throat of an aged woman, then veined with knotted, cruel cords.  Then she stood as transfixed, and her face was mimicking that appalling look on her father’s face which I had seen in the moonlight.  With a yell of ‘Father!’ she leapt from me.  Then she rushed from the house, and I could hear her run by the window, crying, ‘Cursed, cursed, cursed by Henry’s father!’

For an instant the movement took away my breath; but I soon recovered and sprang after her to the door.

There, in the distance, I saw her in the rain, running along the road.  My first impulse was to follow her and run her down.  But luckily I considered the effect this might have in increasing her terror, and stopped.  She was soon out of sight.  I wandered about the road calling her name, and calling on Heaven to have a little pity—­a little mercy.

III

I decided to return to the house, but found that I had lost my way in the obscurity and pelting rain.  For hours I wandered about, without the slightest clue as to where I was.  I was literally soaked to the skin.  Several times I fell into holes in a morass, and was up to my hips in moss and mud and water.  Then I began to call out for assistance till I was hoarse.  I might as well have called out on an uninhabited island.

The night wore on, and the darkness grew so intense that I could scarcely see my hand when I held it up.  Every star in the heavens was hid away as by a thick-pall.  The darkness was positively benumbing to the faculties, and added, if possible, to the misery I was in on account of Winifred.  Suddenly my progress was arrested.  I had fallen violently against something.  A human body, a woman!  I thrust out my hand and seized a woman’s damp arm.

‘Winifred,’ I cried, ‘it’s Henry.’

‘I thought as much.’ said the voice of the Gypsy girl I had met at the wayside inn, and she seized me by the throat with a fearful grip.  ’You’ve been to the cottage and skeared her away, and now she’s seed you there she’ll never come back; she’ll wander about the hills till she drops down dead, or falls over the brinks.’