"Oh, yes, Nial! Yes—yes—yes!"
"And you will help your poor ugly Nial to—to—find it?"
"Sure, it is helping you I will be, with all my heart, Nial-a-ghràidh."
He stooped his head over hers, lightly shoved her back, and kissed her sunshine-hair. She raised an arm and pulled his face to hers, and kissed him gently.
A faint smile, a glimmer of sunlight on a wet, dishevelled road, came over his face.
Oona sat back, relieved, but with questioning eyes.
"Are you sure you have no soul, Nial? Not even a small dark one that will grow some day, and be beautiful, just as you will, when—when—you die?"
"I am sure, birdeen. Ask Màm-Gorm, ask Sorcha, or Alan, or Murdo, or any of the people down yonder. They know. And I know, when I look in the tarn, or in the pool below the Linn o' Mairg, or in smooth water anywhere: ay, and when the deer come to me, or the sheep do not stir out of my way, or the kye come close and breathe on me kindly. No bee will sting me, and the dragonflies, that even you can't catch, rest sometimes, as the moths do, on my head or arm."
Oona kneeled, and bade the dwarf do likewise. Then she told him that his evil might be because of a rosad upon him, the spell of the Cailliach: and that she knew a sian might ease him. With closed eyes and clasped hands she repeated slowly:
"An ainm an Athar, a Mhic,