The blue eyes glanced up from the pool, and at the speaker. She looked at him, then downward again.
"Nial!"
"Yes ... yes, Oona ..."
"The wood-maid has been playing with you."
"No, no, no—that is not a true word on your lips!"
"Sure, a true thing it is. Look, Nial; see how big it is. The white face of it is yonder by the salmon-hole, and one foot is moving against the rock below us!"
"And what of that! Sure, it is a beautiful soul, dead or alive; and big as a man's should be, and fair and white and strong!"
"Nial ... Nial ... it may be alive, for I see its hands moving ... but ... but"—and here tears came into the child's eyes, and her voice shook with sorrow for her hapless friend—"but ... oh, Nial ... so big a soul will never be able to creep into your body ... for you are small, dear, small, and—and ... an' then it is so big and strong!"
Alas, the pity of it! Never once had Nial thought of this; never had he dreamed that so large a soul could not get into his dwarfish, misshapen frame.
He stared in wild amaze, first at Oona, then at the drowned thing in the water—his soul, or a phantom, or a body, or mayhap the kelpie, he knew not which, now—then at Oona again. A fierce pain was in his eyes. He bit his lip, in the way he did whenever Màm-Gorm struck him—a thing that had not been for months past. A little rivulet of blood trickled into his thin matted beard, tangled and twisted this way and that like a goat's.