ell? I nevaire
heard before. Go to ze house on ze hill--mebbe zey know--"

He closed the door, and, through the open window, Timothy saw him sit
down, still holding the baby and looking at it as though the interrupting
episode were already forgotten. The old man shivered with a passing eerie
sense of being like a ghost knocking vainly at the doors of the living. He
limped up the hill, and knocked on the kitchen door of the old Wilcox
house. To his eyes, dilated with the wide dusk of the early evening, the
windows seemed to blaze with light, and when the door was opened to him he
shaded his eyes, blinking fast against the rays of a lamp held high in the
hand of a round, little woman who looked at him with an impersonal
kindness. His heart beat so he could not speak.

Suddenly from the past rang out his old name, the one he had almost lost
in the dreary years of "Uncle Tim" which lay behind him.

"Why, Piper Tim!" cried the woman in a voice of exceeding warmth and
affection. "Why, it's dear, dear, darling old Piper Tim come back to visit
his old home. I knew ye in a minute by the pipes. Come in! Come in!
There's not a soul livin' or dead that's welcomer in th' house of Moira
Wilcox."

The name blazed high through all the confusion of his swimming senses. To
his blank look she returned a mellow laugh. "Why sure, Timmy darlint,
hasn't anybody; iver told ye I was married? I'd have written ye myself,
only that I knew you couldn't read it, and 'twas hard to tell through
other people. Though, saints preserve us, 'tis long since I thought
anything about it, one way _or_ th' other. 'Tis as nat'ral as breathing
now."

She was pulling him into the warm, light room, taking his cap and pipes
from him, and at the last she pushed him affectionately into a chair, and
stood looking kindly at his pale agitation, her arms wide in a soft angle
as she placed her hands on her rounded hips. "Oh, Timothy Moran, you
darlint! Moira's that glad to see you! You mind me of the times when I was
young and that's comin' to be long ago."

She turned and stepped hastily to the stove from which rose an appetizing
smell of frying ham. As she bent her plump, flushed face over this, the
door opened and two dark-eyed little girls darted in. On seeing a
stranger, they were frozen in mid-flight with the shy gaze of country
children.

"Here, childer, 'tis Piper Tim come back to visit us. Piper Tim that I've
told ye so many tales about--an' the gran' tun