And then she looked as if she was tempted to reveal some secret that
she was bound not to tell.

'Sinfi's been very bad,' she went on, 'but she's better now. Her
daddy says she's under a cuss. She's been a-wastin' away like, but
she's better now.'

'So it's Sinfi who is under a curse now,' I said to myself. 'I
suppose Superstition has at last turned her brain. This perhaps
explains Rhona's mad story.'

'Does anybody but you think she's going to be married?' I asked her.
'Does her father think so?'

'Her daddy says it ain't Sinfi as is goin' to be married; but I think
it's Sinfi! An' you'll know all about it the day arter to-morrow.'
And she tripped away in the direction of the camp.

Lost in a whirl of thoughts and speculations, I turned into Fairy
Glen. And now, below me, lay the rocky dell so dearly beloved by
Winnie; and there I walked in such a magic web of light and shade as
can only be seen in that glen when the moon hangs over it in a
certain position.

I descended the steps to the stream and sat down for a time on one
of the great boulders and asked myself if this was the very boulder
on which Winnie used to sit when she conjured up her childish
visions of fairyland. And by that sweet thought the beauty of the
scene became intensified. There, while the unbroken torrent of
the Conway--glittering along the narrow gorge of the glen between
silvered walls of rock as upright as the turreted bastions of a
castle--seemed to flash a kind of phosphorescent light of its own
upon the flowers and plants and sparsely scattered trees along the
sides, I sat and passed into Winifred's own dream, and the Tylwyth
Teg, which to Winnie represented Oberon and Titania and the whole
group of fairies, swept before me.

Awaking from this dream, I looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy
one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes,
or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion,
took away my breath. Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with
one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish
figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous 'Queen of the
Fair People.'

'Never,' I said to myself, 'was there an optical illusion so perfect.
I can see the moonlight playing upon her hair. But the hair is not
golden, as the hair of the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg should be; it is
dark as Winnie's own.'

Then the face turned and she looked at the river, and then I
e