gorge. All round the pool there
was a narrow ragged ledge leading to this eastern opening. I stood
concealed in my crevice and looked at the peaks, or rather at the
vast masses of billowy vapours enveloping them, as they sometimes
boiled and sometimes blazed, shaking--when the sun struck one and
then another--from brilliant amethyst to vermilion, shot occasionally
with purple, or gold, or blue.

A radiance now came pouring through the eastern opening down the
gorge or cwm itself, and soon the light vapours floating about the
pool were turned to sailing gauzes, all quivering with different
dyes, as though a rainbow had become torn from the sky and woven into
gossamer hangings and set adrift.

Fatigue was beginning to numb my senses and to conquer my brain. The
acuteness of my mental anguish had consumed itself in its own intense
fires. The idea of Winifred's danger became more remote. The
mist-pageants of the morning seemed somehow to emanate from Winnie.

'No one is worthy to haunt such a scene as this,' I murmured, sinking
against the rock, 'but Winifred--so beautiful of body and pure of
soul. Would that I were indeed her "Prince of the Mist," and that we
could die here together with Sinfi's strains in our ears.'

Then I felt coming over me strange influences which afterwards became
familiar to me--influences which I can only call the spells of
Snowdon. They were far more intense than those strange, sweet, wild,
mesmeric throbs which I used to feel in Graylingham Wood, and which
my ancestress, Fenella Stanley, seems also to have known, but they
were akin to them. Then came the sound of Sinfi's crwth and song, and
in the distance repetitions of it, as though the spirits of Snowdon
were, in very truth, joining in a chorus.

At once a marvellous change came over me. I seemed to be listening to
my ancestress, Fenella Stanley, and not to Sinfi Lovell. I was
hearing that strain which in my childhood I had so often tried to
imagine, and it was conjuring up the morning sylphs of the mountain
air and all the 'flower-sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of Snowdon.

V

I shook off the spell when the music ceased; then I began to wonder
why the Gypsy did not return. I was now faint and almost famished for
want of food. I opened the Gypsy's wallet. There was the substantial
and tempting breakfast she had brought from the cottage
cupboard--cold beef and bread, and ale. I spread the breakfast on the
ground.

Scarcely had I do