'The Royal Oak,' Bettws y Coed, he had met a
wild-looking girl as he was using his geologist's hammer on the
mountains. She was bareheaded, and had taken fright at him, and had
run madly in the direction of the most dangerous chasm on the range;
he had pursued her, hoping to save her from destruction, but lost
sight of her close to the chasm's brink. The expression on his face
told me what his thoughts were as to her fate. He accompanied me to
the chasm. It was indeed a dreadful place. We got to the bottom by a
winding path, and searched till dusk among the rocks and torrents,
finding nothing. But I felt that in wild and ragged pits like those,
covered here and there with rough and shaggy brushwood, and full of
wild cascades and deep pools, a body might well be concealed till
doomsday.

My kind-hearted companion accompanied me for some miles, and did his
best to dispel my gloom by his lively and intelligent talk. We parted
at Pen y Gwryd. I never saw him again. I never knew his name. Should
these lines ever come beneath his eyes he will know that though the
great ocean of human life rolls between his life-vessel and mine, I
have not forgotten how and where once we touched.

But how could I rest? Though Hope herself was laughing my hopes to
scorn, how could I rest? How could I cease to search?

Bitter as it was to wander about the hills teasing my soul by
delusions which other people must fain smile at, it would have been
more bitter still to accept for certainty the intolerable truth that
Winifred had died famished, or that her beloved body was a mangled
corpse at the bottom of a cliff. If the reader does not understand
this, it is because he finds it impossible to understand a sorrow
like mine. I refused to return to Raxton, and took Mrs. Davies's
cottage, which was unoccupied, and lived there throughout the autumn.
Every day, wet or dry, I used to sally out on the Snowdonian range,
just as though she had been lost but yesterday, making inquiries,
bribing the good-natured Welsh people (who needed no bribing) to aid
me in a search which to them must have seemed monomaniacal.

The peasants and farmers all knew me. 'Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy
heart?)' they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them.
'How is my heart, indeed!' I would sigh as I went on my way.

Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in
the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who
knew m