significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked
out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the
glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside,
and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the
thickening dusk.

"Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his
friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had
so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not
confide--more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her
husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events,
been but little drawn upon.

Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod,"
for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious
literary entity sprang into imaginative being with _Pharais_. _Pharais_
was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came
simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying,
and how we were both somewhat _intrigué_ by a certain air of mystery
which seemed to attach to the little volume. We were both intimate
friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's
earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in _Pharais_
of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had
previously struck me in one of his _Romantic Ballads and Poems of
Phantasy_, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that
Rudgwick conversation with Mrs. Sharp, and thus made me doubly certain
that "Fiona Macleod" and William Sharp were one, if not the same.
Conceiving no reason for secrecy, and only too happy to find that my
friend had fulfilled his wife's prophecy by such fuller and finer
expression of himself, I stated my belief as to its authorship in a