"Nial! Nial!" moaned Oona pitifully.
"Ay, it is true ... that is a true thing that you will be saying, Oona. Sure, it would need to be a soul as small as your own that would do for poor Nial."
"No, no, Nial!" cried the child comfortingly, "bigger than mine, really, really—yes, and ... and ... fatter!"
A sob shook his heavy frame. Oh, the long seeking, and the near goal, and the bitter futile finding! Still, Oona's sympathy was sweet. Dear birdeen that she was, to say he would have a bigger soul than hers, bigger and fatter too! But, no, he thought—no, better to have one the same as Oona's, for all he was so much older and bigger and stronger than she was.
"Ah, Oona-mùirnean, if I could only find my soul at all—anywhere, anywhere!"
"But you will find it, Nial! You will find it! Sorcha told me that you are sure to find it. Never mind what they say down there in the Strath. What do they know about souls? And ... and ... Nial!"
"Yes, my birdeen."
"If ... if ... you can't find your soul anywhere—and all this summer we'll go seeking, seeking, for it, till we have listened at every tree in the forest and on the mountain-side—if you can't find it anywhere, I am going to marry you!"
Nial looked at the child bewildered. He knew little of what marriage was, save that in the Strath two married people lived in one house, and that the woman was called by the name of her man, and that they were sadder, and led duller lives—so at least it seemed to him. Sure, it would be for pleasure that he and Oona should have a cot of their own, though he, and she too for that, preferred the pinewood; and a thing for laughter that she, the bit birdeen Oona, should be called Bean Nial!
"Why would you be marrying poor Nial, Oona my doo?"