He was stooping, with his arm upholding her, and whispering low, when, suddenly, she lifted the little Ivor toward him. Quietly she lay back against the slope of the green grass. She was dead.
Alan quivered. All the tears of his life rose up in a flood, and drowned his heart. He could not see the child in his arms; but he did not sway nor fall. Sorcha strengthened him.
Then silently the wave of grief, of a grief that might not be spoken, ebbed. Out of the sea of bitterness his soul rose, a rock with the sun shining upon it.
Slowly he raised the child above his head, till the wind was all about it, and the flooding glory of light out of the west.
A look of serene peace came into his face: within him the breath of an immortal joy transcended the poor frailty of the stricken spirit.
When the words that were on his lips were uttered, they were proud and strong as the fires of the sun against the dawn:
"Behold, O God, this is Ivor, the son of Sorcha, that I boon unto Thee, to be, for all the days Thou shalt give him, Thy servant of Joy among men."
There was peace that night upon Iolair. But toward dawn—the morrow of that new, strange life wherein Alan and the child, with Oona mayhap, were to go forth toward those distant isles where, as Sorcha had seen in a vision, Ivor's ministry of joy was to be—a great wind arose.
The hills heard, and the moan of them went up before it. The mountains awoke, and were filled with a sound of rejoicing.