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 making up for the dull apathy of his long exile by the storminess of his days and nights.  Mrs. Wilcox, bustling housewife, hastening about the kitchen, engaged in some late evening task, was moved to a sudden burst of hysterical tears, by the faint sound of Tim’s pipes, dropping down to her from the Round Stone in a whirling roulade of ever-ascending merriness.  “You, Ralph!” she cried angrily through her sobs, to her oldest boy, stricken open-mouthed and silent by his mother’s amazing outburst, “you, Ralph, run up to the Round Stone and tell the Irishman to stop playing that jig over and over.  I’m that tired to-night it drives me wild with nerves!” As she brushed away the tears she said fretfully, “My sakes!  When my liver gets to tormenting me so I have the megrims like a girl, it’s time to do something.”

The boy came back to say that Old Tim had stopped playing “the jig” before he reached him, and was lying sobbing on the stone.

Moira was as approachable as a barn swallow, swooping into the house for a mouthful of food and off again to the sky apparently.  Timothy’s child-heart was guiltily heavy within him, for all his excitement, and when he finally caught her in the pine woods he spoke briefly and firmly, almost like Father Delancey himself.  “Moira, Tim was a big fool to tell you lies.  There aren’t really any little people.  Tis only a way of talkin’-like, to say how lovely the woods and stars an’ all are.”

“Why do you sit on the Round Stone evenings?” asked Moira defiantly.

“That’s just it!  I pretend all kind o’ things, but it’s really because the moon is like gold, and the white fog comes up in puffs like incense in the church, an’ the valley’s all bright wi’ lamps like the sky wi’ stars.  That’s all anybody means by fairies—­just how lovely things are if we can but open our eyes to see thim, an’ take time from th’ ugly business o’ livin’ to hear thim, and get a place quiet enough to half see what everything means.  I didn’t know before, in Ireland, but now I’m like one born again to the ferie country, and now I think I know.  There aren’t any Little People really but just in your own head—­”

Moira shook off his hand and faced him, laughing mockingly, her dark eyes wide with an elfin merriment.  “Are there not, Piper Tim?  Are there not?  Listen!  You’ll see!” She held up a tiny forefinger to the great man towering above her.  As he looked down on her, so pixy-like in the twilight of the pines, he felt his flesh creep.  She seemed to be waiting for something infinitely comic which yet should startle her.  She was poised, half turned as though for flight, yet hung so, without a quiver in an endless listening pause.  The man tried in vain to remember the name of a single saint, so held was he by the breathless expectancy in the eyes of the little hobgoblin.  His nerves gave way with a loud snap when she suddenly leaped up at him with snapping fingers and some whispered, half-heard exclamation of “Now!  Now!” and turning he plunged down the hill in panic-stricken flight.  And the next day Father Delancey took her down to the valley to begin her schooling.