V

At the end of the year she came again, and I had about a year of happiness.  I was with her every day, and every day she grew more necessary to my existence.

It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie’s friend Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl.  Graylingham Wood and Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of a superior kind of Gypsies called Griengroes, that is to say, horse-dealers.  Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands.  Thus it was that Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales.  Compared with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie seemed quite a grave little person.  Rhona’s limbs were always on the move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions.  Her laugh seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it was impossible to mistake for any other.  The laughter of most Gypsy girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona’s laughter was a sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards when she grew up attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her.  It seemed to emanate not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame.  If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell.  Ah, what days they were!  Rhona would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor some miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of flowers that she had been weaving for herself.  This induced Winnie to weave for herself a coronet of sea-weeds, and an entire morning was passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.

A year had made a great difference in Winnie, a much greater difference than it had made in me.  Her aunt, who was no doubt a well-informed woman, had been attending to her education.  In a single year she had taught her French so thoroughly that Winnie was in the midst of Dumas’ Monte Cristo.  And apart from education in the ordinary acceptation of the word, the expansion of her mind had been rapid and great.

Her English vocabulary was now far above mine, far above that of most children of her age.  This I discovered was owing to the fact that a literary English lady of delicate health, Miss Dalrymple, whose slender means obliged her to leave the Capel Curig Hotel, had been staying at the cottage as a lodger.  She had taken I the greatest delight in educating Winnie.  Of course Winnie lost as well as gained by this change.  She was a little Welsh rustic no longer, but a little lady unusually well equipped, as far as education went, for taking her place in the world.

She understood fully now what I meant when I told her that we were betrothed, and again showed that mingling of child-wisdom and poetry which characterised her by suggesting that we should be married on Snowdon, and that her wedding-dress should be the green kirtle and wreath of the fairies, and that her bridesmaids should be her Gypsy friends, Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell.  This I acceded to with alacrity.