"Why do you sit on the Round Stone evenings?" asked Moira defiantly.
"That's just it! I pretend all kind o' things, but it's really because the moon is like gold, and the white fog comes up in puffs like incense in the church, an' the valley's all bright wi' lamps like the sky wi' stars. That's all anybody means by fairies—just how lovely things are if we can but open our eyes to see thim, an' take time from th' ugly business o' livin' to hear thim, and get a place quiet enough to half see what everything means. I didn't know before, in Ireland, but now I'm like one born again to the ferie country, and now I think I know. There aren't any Little People really but just in your own head—"
Moira shook off his hand and faced him, laughing mockingly, her dark eyes wide with an elfin merriment. "Are there not, Piper Tim? Are there not? Listen! You'll see!" She held up a tiny forefinger to the great man towering above her. As he looked down on her, so pixy-like in the twilight of the pines, he felt his flesh creep. 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 faëry 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, strange wanderer on these mountain tops.
Sometimes it rained, the long steady downpour of summer nights, and they sat on the steps of Michael O'Donnell's little cabin, Timothy's pipes sounding sweet and shrill against the deep note of the rushing rain. This was the time of the wildest stories, when sheltering walls were close about them; of newly wed wives carried off by the fairies to live happy always, always without a moment of pain, and then to perish utterly on the Day of Judgment, like a last year's butterfly, for souls cannot live without sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by the sidhe because a cock was not killed on the night of their birth, and of the mystic meaning of vicarious sacrifice; of people who had lain down to sleep unaware in a fairy ring and were foolish ever afterward—that is, as people say, foolish, but really wise, for they saw how things are; of homes built unknowingly across a fairy path where the sidhe take their journeys, and how ill luck followed the inhabitants until they moved, and of the strange penalties for living out of harmony with the little-known currents of the soul's life; of how blind men see more than others; of how a fool is one whose mind is so cleared of all futile commonplace traffic that it reflects untroubled and serene the stars and their courses; of how wisdom is folly, and life, death. All these things and many more did Timothy say in words and play in music on his pipes, and to all of them Moira gave her wide comprehending silence.
The best of all was on evenings when the stars came out first, and then as the two sat watching them from the Round Stone they suddenly began to pale, and the moon flashed into sight, rising swiftly over the mountain Moira called "The Hill o' Delights," because it was from a wide, white door in it that the rushing, light-footed little people came out every evening when the twilight fell and the harsh endeavor of human life was stilled to peace. There was neither talk nor music on those evenings, but a silence full, like the lovely world about them, of unsaid, quivering joy. Sometimes Timothy would turn after such a long time of deep and cheering mutual knowledge of how fair were all things, and find Moira slipped away from beside him; but so impalpable was the companionship she gave him in the strange and sweet confusion of his thoughts that he did not feel himself alone, though she might be already deep in the pines behind him.
The girl grew taller, but the cool whiteness of her face was untinged by any flush of young maidenhood. At seventeen she was a slender sprite of a girl, to reach whose unearthly aloofness the warm human hands of her companions strained unavailing. Each winter she descended to the valley and to school and church, a silent, remote child, moving like one in a dream. And every spring she came back to the hill, to Timothy and his pipes, to the pines and the uplands, to the Round Stone and the white road in front of it. Ralph Wilcox, hearty, kindly son of his hearty, kindly parents, tried to speak to her long enough to make her seem real, but she was rarely in the house except during the day and a half of each week when her father was there; and on their casual encounters out of doors she melted from before his eyes like a pixie, knowing the hiding places and turns of his own land better than he. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of her afterward, regarding him steadily and curiously from a nook in a hillside, and once as she darted away she had dropped a handkerchief and turned her head in time to see him pick it up; but she did not slacken her pace, or speak to him then or at all.