Ah! but this thought about the futility of the curse, about the folly of my father’s superstitions, brought me no comfort.  I knew that, brave as Winifred was as a child, she was, when confronting the material world, very superstitious.  I remembered that as a child, whenever I said, ‘What a happy day it has been!’ she would not rest until she had made me add, ‘and shall have many more,’ because of her feeling of the prophetic power of words.  I knew that the superstitions of the Welsh hills awed her.  I knew that it had been her lot to imbibe, not only Celtic, but Romany superstitions.  I knew that the tribe of Gypsies with whom she had been thrown into contact, the Lovells and the Boswells, though superior to the rest, of the Romany race, are the most superstitious of all, and that Winifred had become an object of strong affection to the most superstitious even among that tribe, one Sinfi Lovell.  I knew from something that had once fallen from her as a child on the sands, when prattling about Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell, that especially powerful with her was the idea (both Romany and Celtic) about the effect of a dead man’s curse.  I knew that this idea had a dreadful fascination for her—­the fascination of repulsion.  I knew also that reason may strive with superstition as with the other instincts, but it will strive in vain.  I knew that it would have been worse than idle for me to say to Winifred, ’There is no curse in the matter.  The dreaming mystic who begot and forgot me, what curse could he call down on a soul like my Winifred’s?’ Her reason might partly accept my arguments; but straightway they would be spurned by her instincts and her traditional habits of thought.  The terrible voice of the Psalmist would hush every other sound.  Her sweet soul would pine under the blazing fire of a curse, real or imaginary; her life would be henceforth but a bitter penance.  Like the girl in Coleridge’s poem of ‘The Three Graves,’ her very flesh would waste before the fires of her imagination.  ‘No,’ said I, ’such a calamity as this which I dread Heaven would not permit.  So cruel a joke as this Hell itself would not have the heart to play.’

My meditations were interrupted by a sound, and then by a sensation such as I cannot describe.  Whence came that shriek?  It was like a coming from a distance—­loud there, faint here, and yet it seemed to come from me!  It was as though I were witnessing some dreadful sight unutterable and intolerable.  And then it seemed the voice of Winifred, and then it seemed her father’s voice, and finally it seemed the voice of my own father struggling in his tomb.  My horror stopped the pulses of my heart for a moment, and then it passed.