After blundering through marshy and boggy hillocks for miles, I found myself at last in the locality indicated to me.  Arriving at a roadside public-house, I entered it, and on inquiry was vexed to find that I had again been misdirected.  I slept there, and in the morning started again on my quest.  I was now a long way off my destination, but had at least the satisfaction of knowing that I was on the right road at last.  In the afternoon I reached another wayside inn, very similar to that in which I had slept.  I walked up at once to the landlord (a fat little Englishman who looked like a Welshman, with black eyes and a head of hair like a black door-mat), and asked him if he had known Mrs. Davies.  He said he had, but seemed anxious to assure me that he was a Chester man and ‘not a Taffy.’  She had died, he told me, not long since.  But he had known more of her niece, Winifred Wynne (or, as most people called her, Winifred Davies); for, said he, ’she was a queer kind of outdoor creature that everybody knew.—­as fond of the rain and mist as sensible folk are fond of sunshine.’

‘Where did she live?’ I inquired.

‘You must have passed the very door,’ said the man.  And then he indicated a pretty little cottage by the roadside which I had passed, not far from the lake.  Mrs. Davies (he told me) had lived there with her niece till the aunt died.

‘Then you knew Winifred Wynne?’ I said.  There was to me a romantic kind of interest about a man who had seen Winifred in Wales.

‘Knew her well,’ said he.  ‘She was a Carnarvon gal—­tremenjus fond o’ the sea—­and a rare pretty gal she was.’

‘Pretty gal she is, you might ha’ said, Mr. Blyth,’ a woman’s voice exclaimed from the settle beneath the window.  ’She’s about in these parts at this very moment, though Jim Burton there says it’s her ghose.  But do ghoses eat and drink? that’s what I want to know.  Besides, if anybody’s like to know the difference between Winnie Wynne and Winnie Wynne’s ghose, I should say it’s most likely me.’

I turned round.  A Gypsy girl, dressed in fine Gypsy costume, very dark but very handsome, was sitting on a settle drinking from a pot of ale, and nursing an instrument of the violin kind, which she was fondling as though it were a baby.  She was quite young, not above eighteen years of age, slender, graceful—­remarkably so, even for a Gypsy girl.  Her hair, which was not so much coal-black as blue-black, was plaited in the old-fashioned Gypsy way, in little plaits that looked almost as close as plaited straw, and as it was of an unusually soft and fine texture for a Gypsy, the plaits gave it a lustre quite unlike that which unguents can give.  As she sat there, one leg thrown over the over, displaying a foot which, even in the heavy nailed boots, would have put to shame the finest foot of the finest English lady I have ever seen, I could discern that she was powerful and tall; her bosom, gently rising and falling beneath