With a low laugh Cathal removed his raiment from him. The whiteness of his body was like a flower there in the moonshine.
“That shall not be against me,” he said. “Truly I am a man no longer, if thee and thine will have me as one of the wood-folk.”
At that Deòin called. Many green phantoms glided out of the trees, and others, hand-in-hand, flower-crowned, crossed the glade.
“Look, green lives,” Deòin cried in her sweet leaf-whisper, rising now like a wind-song among birchen boughs: “Look, here is a human. His life is mine, for I saved him. I have put the moonshine dew upon his eyes. He sees as we see. He would be one of us, for all that he has no tree for his body, but flesh, white over red.”
One who had moved thitherward out of an ancient oak looked at Cathal.
“Wouldst thou be of the wood-folk, man?”
“Ay, fain am I; for sure, for sure, O druid of the trees.”
“Wilt thou learn and abide by our laws, the first of which is that none may stir from his tree until the dusk has come, nor linger away from it when the dawn opens gray lips and drinks up the shadows?”
“I have no law now but the law of green life.”
“Good. Thou shalt live with us. Thy home shall be the hollow oak where thy kin left thee to die. Why did they do that evil deed?”