loved Sioned Penrhyn. Or had he loved her himself? Or was it Weir?
Surely these letters were his. He had written them to that beautiful
dark-eyed woman with the jewels about her head. He could read the
answers between the lines; he knew them by heart; the passionate words
of the unhappy woman who had quickened his genius from its sleep. Ah,
how he loved her, his beautiful Weir!--No--Sioned was her name, Sioned
Penrhyn, and her picture hung in the castle where the storms beat upon
the grey Welsh cliffs thousands of miles away....

If he had but met her earlier--he might to-day be one of that
brilliant galaxy of poets whose music the whole world honored. Oh! the
wasted years of his life, and his half-hearted attempts to give to
the world those wonderful children of his brain! He had loved and been
jealous of them, those children, and they had multiplied until it had
seemed as if they would prove stronger than his will. But he had let
them sing for himself alone; he would give the world nothing until
one day in that densely peopled land of his brain there should go up
a paean of rejoicing that a child, before which their own glory paled,
had been born. And above the tumult should rise the sound of such a
strain of music as had never been heard out of heaven; and before it
the world should sink to its knees....

And it had come to pass at last, this dream. This woman had awakened
his nature from its torpor, and with the love had come, leaping,
rushing, thundering, a torrent of verse such as had burst from no
man's brain in any age.

And to her he owed his future, his fame, and his immortal name. And
she would be with him always. She had struggled and resisted and
refused him speech, but the terrible strength of her nature had
triumphed over dogmas and over the lesser duties she owed to others;
of her free will she had sent for him. He would be with her in an
hour, and to-morrow they would have left codes and conventions behind
them. There was a pang in leaving this beautiful room where his
poem had been born, and beneath which lay such a picture as man sees
nowhere else on earth. But to that which was to come, what was this?
He would write a few lines to the woman who bore his name, and
then the time would have come to go. She too was a beautiful and a
brilliant woman, but her nature was narrow and cold, and she had never
understood him for a moment. There! he had finished, and she would be
happier without him. She had