Remember that I was a younger son—­that I was swarthy—­that I was a cripple—­and that my mother—­had Frank.  It was as though my heart must leap from my breast towards that child.  Not a word had she spoken, but she had said what the little maimed ‘fighting Hal’ yearned to hear, and without knowing that he yearned.

I restrained myself, and did not yield to the feeling that impelled me to throw my arms round her neck in an ecstasy of wonder and delight.  After a second or two she again threw back her head to gaze at the golden cloud.

‘Look!’ said she, suddenly clapping her hands, ’it’s over both of us now.’

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘The Dukkeripen,’ she said, ’the Golden Hand.  Sinfi and Rhona both say the Golden Hand brings luck:  what is luck?’

I looked up at the little cloud which to me seemed more like a golden feather than a golden hand.  But I soon bent my eyes down again to look at her.

While I stood looking at her, the tall figure of a man came out of the church.  This was Tom Wynne.  Besides being the organist of Raxton ‘New Church,’ Tom was also (for a few extra shillings a week) custodian of the ‘Old Church,’ this deserted pile within whose precincts we now were.  Tom’s features wore an expression of virtuous indignation which puzzled me, and evidently frightened the little girl.  He locked the door, and walked unsteadily towards us.  He seemed surprised to see me there, and his features relaxed into a bland civility.

‘This is (hiccup) Master Aylwin, Winifred,’ he said.

The child looked at me again with the same smile.  Her alarm had fled.

‘This is my little daughter Winifred,’ said Tom, with a pompous bow.

I was astonished.  I never knew that Wynne had a daughter, for intimate as he and I had become, he had actually never mentioned his daughter before.

‘My only daughter,’ Tom repeated.

He then told me, with many hiccups, that, since her mother’s death (that is to say from her very infancy), Winifred had been brought up by an aunt in Wales.  ‘Quite a lady, her aunt is,’ said Tom proudly, ‘and Winifred has come to spend a few weeks with her father.’

He said this in a grandly paternal tone—­a tone that seemed meant to impress upon her how very much obliged she ought to feel to him for consenting to be her father; and, judging from the look the child gave him, she did feel very much obliged.

Suddenly, however, a thought seemed to come back upon Tom, a thought which my unexpected appearance on the scene had driven from his drunken brain.  The look of virtuous indignation returned, and staring at the little girl through glazed eyes, he said with the tremulous and tearful voice of a deeply injured parent,

’Winifred, I thought I heard you singing one of them heathen Gypsy songs that you learnt of the Gypsies in Wales.’

‘No, father,’ said she, ’it was the song they sing in Shire-Carnarvon about the golden cloud over Snowdon and the spirits of the air.’