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 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.