he had met a wild-looking girl as he was using his geologist’s hammer on the mountains.  She was bareheaded, and had taken fright at him, and had run madly in the direction of the most dangerous chasm on the range; he had pursued her, hoping to save her from destruction, but lost sight of her close to the chasm’s brink.  The expression on his face told me what his thoughts were as to her fate.  He accompanied me to the chasm.  It was indeed a dreadful place.  We got to the bottom by a winding path, and searched till dusk among the rocks and torrents, finding nothing.  But I felt that in wild and ragged pits like those, covered here and there with rough and shaggy brushwood, and full of wild cascades and deep pools, a body might well be concealed till doomsday.

My kind-hearted companion accompanied me for some miles, and did his best to dispel my gloom by his lively and intelligent talk.  We parted at Pen y Gwryd.  I never saw him again.  I never knew his name.  Should these lines ever come beneath his eyes he will know that though the great ocean of human life rolls between his life-vessel and mine, I have not forgotten how and where once we touched.

But how could I rest?  Though Hope herself was laughing my hopes to scorn, how could I rest?  How could I cease to search?

Bitter as it was to wander about the hills teasing my soul by delusions which other people must fain smile at, it would have been more bitter still to accept for certainty the intolerable truth that Winifred had died famished, or that her beloved body was a mangled corpse at the bottom of a cliff.  If the reader does not understand this, it is because he finds it impossible to understand a sorrow like mine.  I refused to return to Raxton, and took Mrs. Davies’s cottage, which was unoccupied, and lived there throughout the autumn.  Every day, wet or dry, I used to sally out on the Snowdonian range, just as though she had been lost but yesterday, making inquiries, bribing the good-natured Welsh people (who needed no bribing) to aid me in a search which to them must have seemed monomaniacal.

The peasants and farmers all knew me.  ’Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)’ they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them.  ‘How is my heart, indeed!’ I would sigh as I went on my way.

Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in the Principality.  Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country.  Never a trace of Winifred could I find.

At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen y Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning.  Afterwards I took up my abode at a fishing-inn, and here I stayed the winter through—­scarcely hoping to find her now, yet chained to Snowdon.  After my labours during the day, scrambling among slippery boulders