One day in the bungalow, when I was reading the copious marginalia with which my father had furnished his own copy of The Veiled Queen, I came upon a passage which so completely carried my mind back to the night of our betrothal that I heard as plainly as I had then heard Winnie’s words at the door of her father’s cottage: 

’I should have to come in the winds and play around you in the woods.  I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you.  I should have to follow you about wherever you went.  I should have to beset you till you said:  “Bother Winnie, I wish she’d keep in heaven!"’

The written words of my father that had worked this magical effect upon me were these: 

’But after months of these lonely wanderings in Graylingham Wood and along the sands, not even the reshaping power of memory would suffice to appease my longing; a new hope, wild as new, was breaking in upon my soul, dim and yet golden, like the sun struggling through a sea-fog.  While wandering with me along the sands on the eve of that dreadful day when I lost her, she had declared that even in heaven she could not rest without me, nor did I understand how she could.  For by this time my instincts had fully taught me that there is a kind of love so intense that no power in the universe—­not death itself—­is strong enough to sever it from its object.  I knew that although true spiritual love, as thus understood, scarcely exists among Englishmen, and even among Englishwomen is so rare that the capacity for feeling it is a kind of genius, this genius was hers.  Sooner or later I said to myself, “She will and must manifest herself!"’

I looked up from the book and saw both Sinfi and Pharaoh gazing at me.

‘Sinfi,’ I said, ’what were Winnie’s favourite places among the hills?  Where was she most in the habit of roaming when she stayed with your people?’

‘If I ain’t told you that often enough it’s a pity, brother,’ she said.  ‘What do you think, Pharaoh?’

Pharaoh expressed his acquiescence in the satire by clapping his wings and crowing at me contemptuously.

’The place I think she liked most of all wur that very pool where she and you breakfasted together on that morning.’

‘Were there no other favourite places?’

’Yes, there wur the Fairy Glen; she wur very fond of that.  And there wur the Swallow Falls; she wur very fond of them.  And there wur a place on the Beddgelert pathway, up from the Carnarvon road, about two miles from Beddgelert.  There is a great bit of rock there where she used to love to sit and look across towards Anglesey.  And talking about that place reminds me, brother, that our people and the Boswells and a lot more are camped on the Carnarvon road just where the pathway up Snowdon begins.  And I wur told yesterday by a ’quaintance of mine as I seed outside the bungalow that daddy and Videy had joined them.  Shouldn’t we go and see ’em?’