But then I felt that Sinfi was the mere instrument of the mysterious magic of y Wyddfa, that magic which no other mountain in Europe exercises.  I knew that among all the Gypsies Sinfi was almost the only one who possessed that power which belonged once to her race, that power which is expressed in a Scottish word now universally misused, ‘glamour,’ the power which Johnnie Faa and his people brought into play when they abducted Lady Casilis.

Soon as they saw her well-faured face
They cast the glamour oure her.

‘Yes,’ I said, ’I am convinced that my illusion is the result of two causes, my own brooding over Winnie’s tragedy and the glamour that Sinfi sheds around her, either consciously or unconsciously; that imperious imagination of hers which projects her own visions upon the senses of another person either with or without an exercise of her own will.  This is the explanation, I am convinced.’

Wheresoever I now went, Snowdon’s message to my heart was, ’She lives,’ and my heart accepted the message.  And then the new blessed feeling that Winnie was not lying in a pauper grave had an effect upon me that a few who read these pages will understand—­only a few.  Perhaps, indeed, even those I am thinking of, those who, having lost the one being they loved, feel that the earth has lost all its beauty—­perhaps even these may not be able to sympathise fully with me in this matter, never having had an experience remotely comparable with mine.

When I thought of Winifred lying at the bottom of some chasm in Snowdon, my grief was very great, as these pages show.  Yet it was not intolerable; it did not threaten to unseat my reason, for even then, when I knew so little of the magic of y Wyddfa, I felt how close was the connection between my darling and the hills that knew her and loved her.  But during the time that her death, amidst surroundings too appalling to contemplate, hung before my eyes in a dreadful picture—­during the time when it seemed certain that her death in a garret, her burial in a pauper pit six coffins deep, was a hideous truth and no fancy, all the beauty with which Nature seemed at one time clothed was wiped away as by a sponge.  The earth was nothing more than a charnel-house, the skies above it were the roof of the Palace of Nin-ki-gal.  But now that Snowdon had spoken to me, the old life which had formerly made the world so beautiful and so beloved came back.

All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my heart.  The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the very birds seemed to be warbling at times ‘She’s alive.’

I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin—­

       With love I burn:  the centre is within me;
       While in a circle everywhere around me
       Its Wonder lies—­

that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life, The Veiled Queen.