She had been looking in the direction of the lake, which, however, she could hardly have seen, so low did she sit; and he, as he stood, could see no more of her than the straight white parting of her hair and her tanned forearms and wrists about her knees. The black of her dress was a sooty black, but you would only have called her hair black because there was nothing else to call it. It was neither more nor less black than a bowl of black lustre is black; it had a surface, but it had also depths where you saw the sun again, and the sky lurked, and the green of the ferns that grew about the hut. Had John Willie put his hand near it it might have been dimly reflected, as it would have been reflected in a peat pool. The sound of his voice seemed almost to startle her, but she did not look up. "Hwhat do you say?" she said. She slightly overstressed the internal "h's," and her accent was Welsh, but uniquely soft. As she had not heard, he had to repeat his remark. "I mean those Wakes people. There are thousands of them there now." He made a little motion of his head behind him. "It's better up here." Then, as still she did not reply, he asked her a direct question. "You didn't stay long in Llanyglo, did you?" "I stay there one day," she answered. A scarcely perceptible movement of her forefinger accompanied the numeral. "Oh, then of course that was the day I saw you. Did you see me?" "No." "You were standing at the pier-head, watching the moon rise." Ynys did not deny this. Neither did she confirm it. "Then you disappeared," John Willie continued, "and I couldn't find you again." To this she replied after a moment.--"I went back to the house, and paid the Englishwoman, and then I came away. In the morning I arrive here." "Do you mean you walked all night?" "There is lit-tle night this time of the year." John Willie was silent. Only a week before he had left an evening party at the "Imperial" to find the sun already burning a hole in the edge of Mynedd Mawr. "And how much longer holiday have you?" John Willie asked presently. "Six days," answered the girl; and again the numeral was accompanied by a slight gesture of her fingers. "And then you go back to Liverpool?" Complete silence was all the answer he had to that question. Then, suddenly, Ynys moved. She stood up. For the first time her seaweed-coloured eyes looked straight into John Willie's. "You left that place early. You will be hungry. I caught some fis-s--_brithyll_. I think she cooked now." She disappeared round the corner of the hut.