And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very much.  She did not know that underneath the soul’s direst struggle—­the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the ancestral blood—­there is an awful sense of humour—­a laughter (unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all incongruities, the incongruity of Fate’s game with man.  I apologised to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears.

‘What an extraordinary idea!’ said the old lady, in the conciliatory tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone with her in a railway carriage.  ’I mean he was very eccentric, wasn’t he?’

’Who shall say, madam?  “Bold is the donkey-driver and bold the ka’dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."’

At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered another, and I was left alone.

My intention was to take up my residence at the cottage where Winifred had lived with her aunt.  Indeed, for a few days I did this, taking with me one of the Welsh peasants with whom I had previously made friends.  But of course a lengthened stay in such a house was impossible.  More than ever now I needed attendance, and good attendance, for I had passed into a strange state of irritability—­I had no command over my nerves, which were jarred by the most trifling thing.  I went to the hotel at Peri y Gwryd, but there tourists and visitors made life more intolerable still to a man in my condition.

At first I thought of building a house as near to the cottage as possible; but this would take time, and I could not rest out of Wales.  I decided at last to have a wooden bungalow built.  By telling the builders that time was the first consideration with me, the cost a secondary one, I got a bungalow built in a few weeks.  By the tradesmen of Chester I got it fitted up and furnished to my taste with equal rapidity.  Attending to this business gave real relief.

When the bungalow was finished I removed into it the picture ’Faith and Love.’  I also got in as much painting material as I might want and began to make sketches in the neighbourhood.

Time went on, and there I remained.  In a great degree, however, the habit of grieving was conquered by my application to work.  My moroseness of temper gradually left me.

Beautiful memories began to take the place of hideous ones—­the picture of the mattress and the squalor gave place to pictures of Winifred on the sands of Raxton or on Snowdon.  Yet so much of habit is there in grief that even at this time I was subject to recurrent waves of the old pain—­waves which were sometimes as overmastering as ever.