"sure, they've no toes on their
feet at all! They've danced them all away. And now, Piper Tim, hold your
breath, for they'll be after comin' by, but all so still, so still! so you
won't hear them and maybe think to open your eyes and see them--for that
'ud mean--sh! sh! Piper Tim, don't stir! _They're here! They're here_!"

His eyes ached with the pressure of the strong little hands across them,
his ears ached with straining them into the silence which lay about them.
His heart beat fast with hope and then with certainty. Yes, it was no
longer the thin, dead silence of the New England woods he knew so
unhappily well. It was the still that comes with activity suspended. It
was like the quivering quiet of a dancer, suddenly stricken motionless to
listen for the sound of intruding footsteps. There was not the faintest
sound, but the silence was full of that rich consciousness of life which
marks the first awakening of a profound sleeper.

The hands were withdrawn from before his eyes, but he did not open them.
He reached blindly for his pipes, and played "The Song of Angus to the
Stars," tears of joy running from between his closed eyelids, to recognize
in his own music the quality he had been starving for; the sense of the
futile, poignant beauty, of the lovely and harmless tragedy, of the sweet,
moving, gay sad meaning of things.

When he looked about him he was quite alone. Moira was gone, and the road
lay white and still before him.

II

He did not see her all the next day, although he went down to the little
house to do the household tasks his big hands performed with so curious a
skill. He wished to see her and clear his mind of a weight which the
morning's light had put upon him; but she did not come in answer to his
call. The little house seemed full of her in its apparent emptiness, and
several times he had swung sharply about, feeling her back of him, but
always the room had turned a blank face.

That evening he was returning late from the upland pastures where he had
been searching vainly for a lost cow. His path lay through a thick copse
of maple saplings where it was quite dark. As he emerged into a stony
pasture, he saw the child standing still in the center of a ring of fern,
brown and crumpled by the early frosts. When he appeared she held him
motionless by the sudden passion of her gestured appeal for silence. She
did not stir after this, her hands laid along her cheeks as though to hold
her