landscape amid which I was born had,
no doubt, a charm for me, and could bring to me that nature-ecstacy
which I inherited from Fenella Stanley. But with Wales I actually
fell in love the moment I set foot in the country. This is why I am
hurrying there now.'

And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very
much. She did not know that underneath the soul's direst
struggle--the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the
ancestral blood--there is an awful sense of humour--a laughter
(unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all
incongruities, the incongruity of Fate's game with man. I apologised
to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll
story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had
refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and
unquenchable fountain of tears.

'What an extraordinary idea!' said the old lady, in the conciliatory
tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone
with her in a railway carriage. 'I mean he was very eccentric, wasn't
he?'

'Who shall say, madam? "Bold is the donkey-driver and bold the ka'dee
who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in
any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart and
what it shall some day suffer."'

At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered
another, and I was left alone.

My intention was to take up my residence at the cottage where
Winifred had lived with her aunt. Indeed, for a few days I did this,
taking with me one of the Welsh peasants with whom I had previously
made friends. But of course a lengthened stay in such a house was
impossible. More than ever now I needed attendance, and good
attendance, for I had passed into a strange state of irritability--I
had no command over my nerves, which were jarred by the most trifling
thing. I went to the hotel at Peri y Gwryd, but there tourists and
visitors made life more intolerable still to a man in my condition.

At first I thought of building a house as near to the cottage as
possible; but this would take time, and I could not rest out of
Wales. I decided at last to have a wooden bungalow built. By telling
the builders that time was the first consideration with me, the cost
a secondary one, I got a bungalow built in a few weeks. By the
tradesmen of Chester I got it fitted up and furnished to my taste
with equal rapidity. Attending to this business gave