ep. She seemed to be waiting for
something infinitely comic which yet should startle her. She was poised,
half turned as though for flight, yet hung so, without a quiver in an
endless listening pause. The man tried in vain to remember the name of a
single saint, so held was he by the breathless expectancy in the eyes of
the little hobgoblin. His nerves gave way with a loud snap when she
suddenly leaped up at him with snapping fingers and some whispered,
half-heard exclamation of "_Now! Now_!" and turning he plunged down the
hill in panic-stricken flight. And the next day Father Delancey took her
down to the valley to begin her schooling.

III

Upon her return she had adopted the attitude which she never changed
during all the years until Timothy went away. She would not speak openly,
nor allow Tim to discuss "their" existence. "They mind their business and
we should mind ours," she said, eying him hard; but she made his world
over for him. Every spring she came back from the valley school and every
autumn she went away; and the months in between were golden. After
Timothy's work was done in the evenings, he left the hot kitchen, redolent
of food and fire and kindly human life, took his pipes up on the Round
Stone and played one after another of the songs of the sidhe, until the
child's white face shone suddenly from the dusk.

Then their entertainment varied. Sometimes they sat and watched the white
river fog rise toward them, translucent and distant at first, and then
blowing upon them in gusty, impalpable billows. Timothy's tongue was
loosened by the understanding in the little girl's eyes and he poured out
to her the wise foolishness of his inconsequent and profound faery lore.
He told her what was in the fog for him, the souls of mountain people long
dead, who came back to their home heights thus. He related long tales of
the doings of the leprechaun, with lovely, irrelevant episodes, and told
her what he thought was their meaning.

Some nights the moon rode high and the air was clear and those were not
the times for words--only for sitting quite still and playing every air in
all the world on the pipes. Moira lay beside him, her strange, wide eyes
fixed intently on the road and the shadows until she peopled them almost
visibly to the musician with the folk of his melodies--with Angus, the
beautiful and strong, with Maive, the sad, the happy, with Congal of the
frightful Vision of War, and Mananan, strang