They descended to the Glyn again between the afternoon and the early evening, and with each step as they dropped down the mountain a silence grew and deepened on them. He knew its meaning, if she did not, and, back by the pool again, he first cleaned the forgotten platter (which she tried to prevent), and then stood before her as he had stood when once, with an abrupt, "Nos da," he had stridden away. And in that pause of gazing silence he knew how much was packed--his Yes, his No, hers too; all that lay behind them, all that lay before. For him, there lay enwrapped in it that slight black figure he had seen under the crimson pier-light; his searching for her; his finding her; his struggles, his decision, and then, even in the act of his relinquishment, his wonderful recovery of her. And her memory took a farther flight still. She saw herself, a little girl, sitting with a bandaged foot upon a chair, while a testy girl not two years older than herself drew her likeness. She remembered the unendurable length of those half-hours--unendurable, save that occasionally there looked in at the door or passed the window a cowslip-haired boy, with hard blue eyes that would stare down even his own conscience and none be the wiser, a conquering boy, of a race so habituated to conquest that it takes with the sword-hand and carelessly tosses twice as much back with the other. That was what it meant to her, that silver mark that ran round the edge of her foot as a vein runs round the edge of a pebble.... And for the future? His future might be anything, but hers could be one thing only. For the gipsy loves never but the once. In all but love, the waters of the world are not more unstable than she; in love, the rocks are not more irremovable. Therefore she has no past and no regrets. She has no regrets, for there is no scar upon her heart--how can there be a scar, when a scar is a healing, and this wound is never healed, but ever new, ever quivering? And she has no past--how can she have a past when all is a poignant and lovely present, that endures to the end?... There was so little for John Willie to do. He had only to go away without kissing her again. Kiss her, however, he must not--he was only an ordinary young man---- He knew it, and---- He passed his arms about her waist and drew her down by his side. It was dark in the Glyn long before the light had faded from the open hillside above. In Llyn Delyn not a fish rose to break that dark and intact perfection. The fall into the pool diminished a little in volume, and mossy cushions that had lately been covered began to rise out of the water again. And a heart was laid quiveringly open where formerly only a foot had been maimed. She was twice conquered, for she was Welsh and woman too. In the hearts of the men of her race the fame of their story still lives, and while it lives strife will not cease. As their own proverb says, what the sword took, the tongue will take back again.