‘Quite warm, Winifred,’ I said, as with my heart swelling in my breast, and with eyelids closing over my eyes from very joy, I drew her softly upon my breast once more.

‘Yes—­yes,’ I murmured, as the tears gushed from my eyes and dropped upon the soft hair that I was kissing.  ’If God will but let me have her thus!  I ask for nothing better than to possess a maniac.’

As we sat locked in each other’s arms the head of Sinfi appeared round the eastern cliff of the gorge where I had first seen Winifred.  The Gypsy had evidently been watching us from there.  I perceived that she was signalling to me that I was not to grasp Winifred.  Then I saw Sinfi suddenly and excitedly point to the sky over the rock beneath which we sat.  I looked up.  The upper sky above us was now clear of morning mist, and right over our heads, Winifred’s and mine, there hung a little morning cloud like a feather of flickering rosy gold.  I looked again towards the corner of jutting rock, but Sinfi’s head had disappeared.

‘Dear Prince,’ said Winifred, ’how delightfully warm you are!  How kind of you!  But are not your arms a little too tight, dear Prince?  Poor Winnie cannot breathe.  And this thump, thump, thump, like a—­like a—­fire-engine—­ah!’

Too late I knew what my folly had done.  The turbulent action of my heart had had a sympathetic effect upon hers.  It seemed as if her senses, if not her mind, had remembered another occasion, when, as she was lying in my arms, the beating of my heart had disturbed her.  In one lightning-flash her real life and all its tragedy broke mercilessly in upon her.  The idea of the ‘Prince of the Mist’ fled.  She started up and away from me.  The awful mimicry of her father’s expression spread over her face.  With a yell of ‘Fy Nhad,’ and then a yell of ‘Father!’ she darted round the pool, and then, bounding up the rugged path like a chamois, disappeared behind a corner of jutting rock.

At the same moment the head of the Gypsy girl reappeared round the eastern cleft of the gorge.  Sinfi came quickly up to me and whispered, ‘Don’t follow.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘No, you won’t,’ said she, seizing my wrist with a grip of iron.  ’If you do she’s done for.  Do you know where she is running to?  A couple of furlongs up that path there’s another that branches off on the right; it ain’t more nor a futt-an’-a-half wide along a precipuss more nor a hundred futt deep.  She knows it well.  She’ll make for that.  The cuss is on her wuss nor ever, judgin’ from the gurn and the flash of her teeth.’

I waited for two or three seconds in the wildest impatience.

‘Let’s follow her now,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ she whispered, ’not yet, ’less you want to see her tumble down the cliff.’  After a few minutes Sinfi and I went up the main pathway.  Winnie seemed to have slackened her pace when she was out of sight, for we saw her just turning away on the right at the point indicated by Sinfi.  ‘Give her time to get along that path,’ said she, ‘and then she’ll be all right.’