After that, whenever Rhys and he came into collision he disappeared, and none could say whither he went or with whom. Cate or Owen Griffith might see him pass the cottage door, and exchange a 'good-day' greeting, but beyond that his wanderings were unknown.
In a mountainous parish like Eglwysilan, where was no village community, where farms and cottages were mostly solitary and far apart, there was little chance of encountering many strollers out of the main highway, except on market-days.
Wandering aimlessly in his blind passion, on the day when Rhys had struck him, hardly noting the way he went, he found himself all on a sudden on what appeared to be a short, grass-grown roadway, bordered on both sides by upright blocks of stone, more stunted and less shapely than the slabs in the churchyard, but planted there with so much method in their irregular intervals, they might indeed have been dwarf guards to some great giant turned suddenly to stone by the magic art of a still greater necromancer of the olden time, as he had heard.
Such legends were common on the domestic hearth. So that, although it was a bright spring afternoon, an eerie feeling crept over the passionate boy, especially when he found himself within a wide circle of such stones, surrounding, in double file, a huge angular mass of like stone, narrowing downwards from a flat top, capped by a second stone, and delicately poised on the rounded point of a small conical base in a hollowed depression of the natural rock, and in some sort bearing out the simile of the petrified giant's throne.
As William looked upon this unshapely mass, some dreamy recollection floated through his mind of having visited the spot before, when the stones had seemed alive, and making mouths at him. Without nearing the central stone, but keeping his eye upon it, he walked slowly round within the inner circle, and, as he went discovered a second path (leading north) corresponding with the one by which he had entered from the south.
Then it dawned upon him this must indeed be the spot where he had lain down faint and tired, when he was, oh, such a little boy, and had been so frightened by the grim aspect of the stones, as the dark night had come on, and he could not rise to get away.
Soon he ventured to touch the large central stone that had terrified him before by giving way on the pressure of his tiny hand. It swayed and rocked to and fro, and he drew back instinctively, but it did not fall. And now he knew it surely for the great rocking-stone, and no longer feared that it would fall and crush him so long as he was good and true, for so the legend ran.
But now other doubts and fears oppressed him. These would be the very Druid-stones Owen Griffith had named, and Robert Jones had warned him not to seek, lest some great harm should come to him.
Was it true there were once men called Druids, and did they come to life at midnight and nod to the moon, and to the big nodding-stones? Robert Jones and Ales both said they did, though they had never ventured there at midnight to see. They only looked like ill-shaped stones, too little for men. But had they not made faces at him when he was a bit of a baby crying there in the dark?
The boy's heart sank. He was not proof against the grim and weird recollection. He took to his heels and ran out of the memory-haunted circle by the stone-guarded avenue next to him, nor stopped until he had left the desolate and barren spot far behind.