Seven years ago this woman had taken the one child she had, that she did not believe to be her own but a changeling, and had put it on the shore at the extreme edge of the tide-reach, and had left it for the space of an hour. When she came back, the child she had left with a numbness on its face and with the curse of dumbness, was laughing wild, and when she came near, it put out its arms and gave the cry of the young of birds. She lifted the "leanav" in her arms and stared into its eyes, but there was no longer the weary blankness, and the little one yearned with the petulant laughing and idle whimpering of the children of other mothers. And that mother there gave a cry of joy, and with a singing heart went home.
It was in the seventh year after that finding by the sea, that one day, when a cold wind was blowing from the west, the child Morag came in by the peat-fire, where her mother was boiling the porridge, and looked at her without speaking. The mother turned at that, and looked at Morag. Her heart sank like a pool-lily at shadow, when she saw that Morag had woven a wreath of brown tangled seaweed into her hair. But that was nothing to the bite in her breast when the girl began singing a song that had not a word in it she had ever heard on her own or other lips, but was wild as the sound of the tide calling in dark nights of cloud and wind, or as the sudden coming of waves over a quiet sea in the silence of the black hours of sleep.
"What is it, Morag-mo-run?" she asked, her voice like a reed in the wind.
"It's time," says Morag, with a change in her eyes, and her face shining with a gleam on it.
"Time for what, Morag?"
"For me to be going back to the place I came from."
"And where will that be?"
"Where would it be but to the place you took me out of, and called across?"
The mother gave a cry and a sob. "Sure, now, Morag-a-ghraidh, you will be my own lass and no other?"
"Whist, woman," answered the girl; "don't you hear the laughing in the burn, [Footnote: Burn: a small stream.] and the hoarse voice out in the sea?"