of the bright eyes looking at me.  Then a little hand was put over the parapet, and I saw a dark hat swinging by its strings, as she was waving it to me.  Oh! that I could have climbed those steps and done that!  But that exploit of hers touched a strange chord within me.  Had she been a boy, I could have borne it in a defiant way; or had she been any other girl than this, my heart would not have sunk as it now did when I thought of the gulf between her and me.  Down I sat upon a grave, and looked at her with a feeling quite new to me.

This was a phase of cripplehood I had not contemplated.  She soon left the tower, and made her appearance at the church door again.  After locking it, which she did by thrusting a piece of stick through the handle of the key, she came and stood over me.  But I turned my eyes away and gazed across the sea, and tried to deceive myself into believing that the waves, and the gulls, and the sails dreaming on the sky-line, and the curling clouds of smoke that came now and then from a steamer passing Dullingham Point were interesting me deeply.  There was a remoteness about the little girl now, since I had seen her unusual agility, and I was trying to harden my heart against her.  Loneliness I felt was best for me.  She did not speak, but stood looking at me.  I turned my eyes round and saw that she was looking at my crutches, which were lying beside me aslant the green hillock where I sat.  Her face had turned grave and pitiful.

‘Oh!  I forgot,’ she said.  ‘I wish I had not run away from you now.’

‘You may run where you like for what I care,’ I said.  But the words were very shaky, and I had no sooner said them than I wished them back.  She made no reply for some time, and I sat plucking the wild-flowers near my hands, and gazing again across the sea.  At last she said,

‘Would you like to come in our garden?  It’s such a nice garden.’

I could resist her no longer.  That voice would have drawn me had she spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin.  To describe it would of course be impossible.  The novelty of her accent, the way in which she gave the ‘h’ in ‘which,’ ‘what,’ and ‘when,’ the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me as the timbre of her voice.  And let me say here, once for all, that when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives; but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair.  I found that to use colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.

Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book will go out to the world.  While a story-teller may reproduce, by means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to represent Welsh accent.