‘She loves me more than anybody else in the whole world,’ said Winifred simply.  ’She says she would lay down her life for me, and I really believe she would.  Well, there is not far from where I used to live a famous cascade called the Swallow Falls, where the water drops down a chasm of great depth.  If you listen to the noise of the cataract, you may hear mingled with it a peculiar kind of wail as from a man in great agony.  It is said to be the wail of a Sir John Wynn, of Gwydir, whose spirit is under a curse, and is imprisoned at the bottom of the falls on account of his cruelty and misdeeds on earth.  On those rare nights when the full moon shines down the chasm, the wail becomes an agonised shriek.  Once on a bright moonlight night Sinfi and I went to see these falls.  The moonlight on the cascade had exactly the same supernatural appearance that it has now falling upon these billows.  Sinfi sings some of our Welsh songs, and accompanies herself on a peculiar obsolete Welsh instrument called a crwth, which she always carries with her.  While we were listening to the cataract and what she called the Wynn wail, she began to sing the wild old air.  Then at once the wail sprang into a loud shriek; Sinfi said the shriek of a cursed spirit; and the shriek was exactly like the sound I heard from the cliffs a little while ago.’

’I heard the same noise, Winnie.  It was simply the rending and cracking of the poor churchyard trees as they fell.’

She turned back with me to the water-mark to see the waves come tumbling in beneath the moon.  We sauntered along the sea-margin again, heedless of the passage of time.

And again (as on that betrothal night) Winifred prattled on, while I listened to the prattle, craftily throwing in a word or two, now and then, to direct the course of the sweet music into such channels as best pleased my lordly whim,—­when suddenly, against my will and reason, there came into my mind that idea of the sea’s prophecy which was so familiar to my childhood, but which my studies had now made me despise.

The sea then threw up to Winifred’s feet a piece of seaweed.  It was a long band of common weed, that would in the sunlight have shone a bright red.  And at that very moment—­right across the sparkling bar the moon had laid over the sea—­there passed, without any cloud to cast it, a shadow.  And my father’s description of his love-tragedy haunted me, I knew not why.  And right across my life, dividing it in twain like a burn-scar, came and lay for ever that strip of red seaweed.  Why did my father’s description of his own love-tragedy haunt me?

Before recalling the words that had fallen from my father in Switzerland, I was a boy:  in a few minutes afterwards, I was a man with an awful knowledge of Destiny in my eyes—­a man struggling with calamity, and fainting in the grip of dread.  My manhood, I say, dates from the throwing up of that strip of seaweed.  Winifred picked up the weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.