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 loud note that wud ha’ wakened the sidhe for miles around in Donegal.  An’ then she looked at me as dumb as a fish, her big gray eyes blank as a plowed field wid nothin’ sown in it.  She niver has a word to show that she hears me, even, when I tell o’ the gentle people.”  He added in a whisper to himself, “But maybe she’s only waiting.”

“‘Tis the Virgin protectin’ her from yer foolishness, Tim,” returned the priest, rising with a relieved air.  “She’ll soon be goin’ to district school along with all the other hard-headed little Yankees, and then your tales can’t give her notions.”  With which triumphant meditation he walked briskly away, leaving Timothy to sit alone with his pipes under the maple-tree, flaming with a still heat of burning autumn red, like a faery fire.

His head sank heavily in his hands as his heart grew intolerably sad with the lack he felt in all the world, most of all in himself.  He had often tried to tell himself what made the world so dully repellant, but he never could get beyond, “‘Tis as though I was aslape an’ yet not quite aslape—­just half wakin’, an’ somethin’ lovely is goin’ on in the next room, an’ I can’t wake up to see what ‘tis.  The trouble’s with th’ people.  They’re all dead aslape here, an’ there’s nobody to wake me up.”