u a man o' God."

"I do _not_, Timothy! Tis but a way of speech that I learned in my
childhood. An' 'tis lucky for you that I have a knowledge of thim, for any
other priest would have driven you out of the parish, you and your
stubborn pipes that do naught but play faery music. An' you a man of forty
in a trifle of six days, and no wife an' childer to keep you from foolish
notions. If ye had, now, you could be livin' in the proper tenant's house
for the Wilcox's man, instead of Michael O'Donnell, who has no business
livin' up here on the hill so far from his work that he can come home but
once a week to look after his poor motherless child. I will say for you,
Tim, that you do your duty by that bit of a slip of a girl baby, keepin'
her so neat and clean an' all, times when Mike's not here."

Timothy did not raise his drooping head at this praise, and something
about his attitude struck sharp across the priest's trained observation.
The big, shambling, red-headed man looked like a guilty child. There was a
moment's silence, while Father Delancey speculated, and then his
experienced instinct sped him to the bull's-eye. "Timothy Moran, you're
not putting your foolish notions in the head of that innocent child o'
God, Moira O'Donnell, are you?"

The red head sank lower.

"Answer me, man! Are ye fillin' her mind with your sidhe[A] and your
red-hatted little people an' your stories of 'gentle places' an' the
leprechaun?"

[Footnote A: Pronounced _shee_ (as in Banshee), the fairies.]

Timothy arose suddenly and flung his long arms abroad in a gesture of
revolt. "I am that, Father Delancey, 'tis th' only comfort of my life,
livin' it, as I do, in a dead country--a valley where folks have lived and
died for two hundred years such lumps of clay that they niver had wan man
sharp enough to see the counts in between heaven and earth." He lapsed
again into his listless position on the Round Stone. "But ye needn't be
a-fearin' for her soul, Father--her wid th' black hair an' the big gray
eyes like wan that cud see thim if she wud! She's as dead a lump as anny
of th' rest--as thim meat-eatin' Protestants, the Wilcoxes, heaven save
the kindly bodies, for they've no souls at all, at all." From the stone he
picked up a curiously shaped willow whistle with white lines carved on it
in an odd criss-cross pattern. "To-day's her seventh birthday, an' I
showed her how to make the cruachan whistle, an' when I'd finished she
blew on it a lo