I had been one night to the theatre with my mother and my aunt.  The house had been unusually crowded.  When the performance was over, we found that the streets were deluged with rain.  Our carriage had been called some time before it drew up, and we were standing under the portico amid a crowd of impatient ladies when a sound fell or seemed to fall on my ears which stopped for the moment the very movements of life.  Amid the rattle of wheels and horses’ feet and cries of messengers about carriages and cabs, I seemed to distinguish a female voice singing: 

’I met in a glade a lone little maid. 
At the foot of y Wyddfa the white;
Oh, lissom her feet as the mountain hind,
And darker her hair than the night!’

It was the voice of Winifred singing as in a dream.

I heard my aunt say,

’Do look at that poor girl singing and holding out her little baskets!  She must be crazed to be offering baskets for sale in this rain and at this time of night.’

I turned my eyes in the direction in which my aunt was looking, but the crowd before me prevented my seeing the singer.

‘She is gone, vanished,’ said my aunt sharply, for my eagerness to see made me rude.

‘What was she like?’ I asked.

’She was a young slender girl, holding out a bunch of small fancy baskets of woven colours, through which the rain was dripping.  She was dressed in rags, and through the rags shone, here and there, patches of her shoulders; and she wore a dingy red handkerchief round her head.  She stood in the wet and mud, beneath the lamp, quite unconscious apparently of the bustle and confusion around her.’

Almost at the same moment our carriage drew up.  I lingered on the step as long as possible.  My mother made a sign of impatience at the delay, and I got into the carriage.  Spite of the rain, I put down the window and leaned out.  I forgot the presence of my mother and aunt.  I forgot everything.  The carriage moved on.

‘Winifred!’ I gasped, as the certainty that the voice was hers came upon me.

And the dingy London night became illuminated with scrolls of fire, whose blinding, blasting scripture seared my eyes till I was fain to close them:  ’Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread:  let them seek it also out of desolate places.’

So rapidly had the carriage rolled through the rain, and so entirely had my long pain robbed me of all presence of mind, that, by the time I had recovered from the paralysing shock, we had reached Piccadilly Circus.  I pulled the check-string.

‘Why, Henry!’ said my mother, who had raised the window, ’what are you doing?  And what has made you turn so pale?’

My aunt sat in indignant silence.  ‘Ten thousand pardons,’ I said, as I stepped out of the carriage, and shook hands with them.  ’A sudden recollection—­important papers unsecured at my hotel—­business in—­in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  I will call on you in the morning.’