In that solitary place she was doubly alone. No eyes were there to espy her, save those of the cushats and a thrush whose heart beat wildly against her callow brood. She was like the spirit of woodland loneliness: a lovely thing of fantasy that might recreate its beauty the next moment in a medley of sun-rays, or as a floating golden light about the green boles, or as a windflower swaying among the tree-roots with its own exquisite vibration of life. So elemental was she, then and there, that if she herself had passed into the rhythm of her rapt dance and so merged into the cadence of the wind among leaves and branches, or into the remoter murmuring of the mountain burns and of the white cataracts even then leaping into the sun-dazzle and seeming never to fall though for ever falling—if this change had been wrought, as the swift change from shadow-gloom to sun-gloom, nothing of it would have seemed unnatural. She was as absolutely one with nature as though she were a dancing sunbeam, or the brief embodiment of the joy of the wind.
As the child danced, a human mote in that vast area of sun-splashed woodland, the light flooded in upon her scanty and ragged dress of brown homespun, from which her arms and legs emerged as the white chestnut-buds from their sheaths of amber. Her skin was of the hue and smoothness of crudded cream, where not sunburnt to the brown of the wallflower. Dark as were her heavily lashed eyes, her hair, a mass of short curls creeping and twisting and leaping throughout a wild and tangled waviness, was of a wonderful white-like yellow, as of the sheen of wheat on a windy August noon or the strange amber-gold of the harvest-moon when rising through a sigh of mist. She was beautiful, but rather with the promise of beauty than beauty itself—as the bud of the moss-rose is lovely but has a fairer loveliness in fee. Though her face was pale, its honeysuckle-pallor was so wrought by the sun and wind that her cheeks had the glow of sunlit hill-water. In every line, in every contour of her body, in every movement, every pose, a beautiful untutored grace displayed itself. A glimpse of the secret of all this winsomeness opened at times in the eyes. These were full of a changing light. The "breath" was upon her: on her rhythmic limbs, on her flowing hair, on her parted lips.
To and fro, flickeringly as a leaf shadow, the small body tripped and leapt. Sometimes she raised her arms when with tossed-back head she sprang to one side or forward: sometimes she clapped her hands, and a smile for a moment dreamed rather than lay upon her face. But none seeing her could have thought she danced out of mere glee. No birdeen of laughter slipped from the little lips: the eyes had a steadfast intensity amid all their waywardness. Either the child was going through this fantastic byplay for some ulterior reason, or she was wrought by an ecstasy that could be expressed only in this way. Perhaps no one who had met a glance of those wildwood eyes could have doubted that she was rapt by an unconscious fantasy of rhythm.
A stillness had grown about the heart even of the patient mavis in the rowan beside the winding shadow-haunted pool, a few yards away from the spot where the child soundlessly danced. A clear call came from its mate ever and again: neither feared any longer this dancer in the sunset-shine. The cushats crooned unheedingly. In a glade above, a roe stood, gazing wonder-stricken: but after a restless pawing of the ground she lidded her unquiet eyes, and browsed contentedly under the fern.
Suddenly the dancer stopped. She stood in that exquisite poise of arrested motion which for a moment the wave has when it lifts its breast against the wind. Intently she listened: with eyes dilated and nostrils swiftly expanding and contracting, like any wild thing of the woodlands.
A voice, strangely harsh in its high, thin falsetto, resounded from the upper glades.
"Oona!"
The child smiled, relaxed from her intent attitude, and listlessly moved a step or two forward.
"Oona! Oona!! Oona!"
"It is Nial," she muttered. "I don't want him. I am tired of helping him to look for his soul."