He did not see her all the next day, although he went down to the little house to do the household tasks his big hands performed with so curious a skill. He wished to see her and clear his mind of a weight which the morning's light had put upon him; but she did not come in answer to his call. The little house seemed full of her in its apparent emptiness, and several times he had swung sharply about, feeling her back of him, but always the room had turned a blank face.
That evening he was returning late from the upland pastures where he had been searching vainly for a lost cow. His path lay through a thick copse of maple saplings where it was quite dark. As he emerged into a stony pasture, he saw the child standing still in the center of a ring of fern, brown and crumpled by the early frosts. When he appeared she held him motionless by the sudden passion of her gestured appeal for silence. She did not stir after this, her hands laid along her cheeks as though to hold her head quite still, her eyes directed with a smiling eagerness toward a huge rock, looming dimly in the transparent twilight. The silence was oppressive. Timothy's blood ran chill as the expectancy grew more and more strained in the child's eyes. He did not dare look at the rock himself. He stared only at the elfin creature before him, and when her hands were finally flung out in a gesture of welcoming ardor, he broke the unearthly silence by crying out loud in a rapid whirl, "God save us. Christ save us! The Holy Virgin guard us! St. Patrick defend us! St. Columba—"
The little girl burst into a storm of tears and sank down on the ferns. Timothy stopped his hysterical litany and ran toward her. "Don't you come a-near me, bad Piper Tim!" she sobbed. "You don't dare step on the magic circle anyhow. It 'ud burn your wicked foot!"
The big farm laborer drew back in a terror he instantly disguised. "I was just lookin' for you, Moira aroon," he said propitiatingly. "I was wishin' to tell you—to tell you—why, that it's all pretend. There aren't any little people really, you know. Tis just old Tim's nonsense." He shivered at the blasphemy and crossed himself. "Or, if there are any, 'tis only in th' ould country." The child rose to her feet, eying him strangely, her eyes like deep pools.
He went on conscientiously, with a mental eye on Father Delancey, "An' if there are any, which they aren't, they're bad things for Christians to have aught to do with, because they know neither right nor wrong, and 'tisn't fit that mortals should iver be light an' gay wi' that burden gone! So they're bad for us—an' we shouldn't think of thim, and just cross ourselves wheniver—"
The unspoken protest in the child's face was grown so passionate that he interrupted himself to answer it in a burst of sympathy. "Och, Moira, acushla, sure an' I know how 'tis to ye—" And then with a reaction to virtue, he said sternly, "An' if they're not bad, why do they go when you call on the blessed saints?"
At this the child's face twisted again for tears. "Och, bad Piper Tim, to scare them away from me! It's not that they're bad—only that good's too heavy for them. They're such little people! It's too heavy! It's too heavy." She ran away through the dusk, sobbing and calling this over her shoulder reproachfully.
In the weeks which followed, old Timothy Moran, as he was called, could scarcely complain that he was but half awake. He seemed to be making up for the dull apathy of his long exile by the storminess of his days and nights. Mrs. Wilcox, bustling housewife, hastening about the kitchen, engaged in some late evening task, was moved to a sudden burst of hysterical tears, by the faint sound of Tim's pipes, dropping down to her from the Round Stone in a whirling roulade of ever-ascending merriness. "You, Ralph!" she cried angrily through her sobs, to her oldest boy, stricken open-mouthed and silent by his mother's amazing outburst, "you, Ralph, run up to the Round Stone and tell the Irishman to stop playing that jig over and over. I'm that tired to-night it drives me wild with nerves!" As she brushed away the tears she said fretfully, "My sakes! When my liver gets to tormenting me so I have the megrims like a girl, it's time to do something."
The boy came back to say that Old Tim had stopped playing "the jig" before he reached him, and was lying sobbing on the stone.
Moira was as approachable as a barn swallow, swooping into the house for a mouthful of food and off again to the sky apparently. Timothy's child-heart was guiltily heavy within him, for all his excitement, and when he finally caught her in the pine woods he spoke briefly and firmly, almost like Father Delancey himself. "Moira, Tim was a big fool to tell you lies. There aren't really any little people. Tis only a way of talkin'-like, to say how lovely the woods and stars an' all are."