I would then leap from my bed, light a candle, unlock my cabinet, take out the cross, and holding it aloft prepare to dash it against the wall, when my hand would be arrested by the same ancestral voices, Romany and Gorgio, whispering in my ears and at my heart,

’If you break that amulet, how shall you ever be able to see what would be the effect upon Winnie’s fate of its restoration to your father’s tomb?’

And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from caves of palaeolithic man.

’How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the accursed one?’ the voices would say.  And then I would laugh again till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a maniac.

But then my aunt’s picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice of the North Sea in the March wind:  ’Look at that.  How dare you leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any one—­even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic—­a means of finding Winifred?  What is the meaning of the great instinct which has always conquered the soul in its direst need—­which has always driven man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that are unseen?  What though that scientific reason of yours tells you that Winifred’s misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes?  Is the voice of man’s puny reason clothed with such authority that it dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds?  The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways.  With an inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the grave.  Look at that beggar in the street!  How dare you ignore the theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even though your reason laughs it to scorn?’

And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a guilty thing—­ashamed before myself.

But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre Superstition, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them there.  And the auger against my ancestors’ mysticism grew with the growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same mysticism myself.  And then I would get up again and take from my escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley’s letters which I had brought from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man’s curse which Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.