head quite still, her eyes directed with a smiling eagerness toward a
huge rock, looming dimly in the transparent twilight. The silence was
oppressive. Timothy's blood ran chill as the expectancy grew more and more
strained in the child's eyes. He did not dare look at the rock himself.
He stared only at the elfin creature before him, and when her hands were
finally flung out in a gesture of welcoming ardor, he broke the unearthly
silence by crying out loud in a rapid whirl, "God save us. Christ save us!
The Holy Virgin guard us! St. Patrick defend us! St. Columba--"

The little girl burst into a storm of tears and sank down on the ferns.
Timothy stopped his hysterical litany and ran toward her. "Don't you come
a-near me, bad Piper Tim!" she sobbed. "You don't dare step on the magic
circle anyhow. It 'ud burn your wicked foot!"

The big farm laborer drew back in a terror he instantly disguised. "I was
just lookin' for you, Moira aroon," he said propitiatingly. "I was wishin'
to tell you--to tell you--why, that it's all pretend. There aren't any
little people really, you know. Tis just old Tim's nonsense." He shivered
at the blasphemy and crossed himself. "Or, if there are any, 'tis only in
th' ould country." The child rose to her feet, eying him strangely, her
eyes like deep pools.

He went on conscientiously, with a mental eye on Father Delancey, "An' if
there _are_ any, which they aren't, they're bad things for Christians to
have aught to do with, because they know neither right nor wrong, and
'tisn't fit that mortals should iver be light an' gay wi' that burden
gone! So they're bad for us--an' we shouldn't think of thim, and just
cross ourselves wheniver--"

The unspoken protest in the child's face was grown so passionate that he
interrupted himself to answer it in a burst of sympathy. "Och, Moira,
acushla, sure an' I know how 'tis to ye--" And then with a reaction to
virtue, he said sternly, "An' if they're not bad, why do they go when you
call on the blessed saints?"

At this the child's face twisted again for tears. "Och, bad Piper Tim, to
scare them away from me! It's not that they're bad--only that good's too
heavy for them. They're such _little_ people! It's too heavy! It's too
heavy." She ran away through the dusk, sobbing and calling this over her
shoulder reproachfully.

In the weeks which followed, old Timothy Moran, as he was called, could
scarcely complain that he was but half awake. He seemed to be m