The best of all was on evenings when the stars came out first, and then as the two sat watching them from the Round Stone they suddenly began to pale, and the moon flashed into sight, rising swiftly over the mountain Moira called “The Hill o’ Delights,” because it was from a wide, white door in it that the rushing, light-footed little people came out every evening when the twilight fell and the harsh endeavor of human life was stilled to peace.  There was neither talk nor music on those evenings, but a silence full, like the lovely world about them, of unsaid, quivering joy.  Sometimes Timothy would turn after such a long time of deep and cheering mutual knowledge of how fair were all things, and find Moira slipped away from beside him; but so impalpable was the companionship she gave him in the strange and sweet confusion of his thoughts that he did not feel himself alone, though she might be already deep in the pines behind him.

The girl grew taller, but the cool whiteness of her face was untinged by any flush of young maidenhood.  At seventeen she was a slender sprite of a girl, to reach whose unearthly aloofness the warm human hands of her companions strained unavailing.  Each winter she descended to the valley and to school and church, a silent, remote child, moving like one in a dream.  And every spring she came back to the hill, to Timothy and his pipes, to the pines and the uplands, to the Round Stone and the white road in front of it.  Ralph Wilcox, hearty, kindly son of his hearty, kindly parents, tried to speak to her long enough to make her seem real, but she was rarely in the house except during the day and a half of each week when her father was there; and on their casual encounters out of doors she melted from before his eyes like a pixie, knowing the hiding places and turns of his own land better than he.  Sometimes he caught a glimpse of her afterward, regarding him steadily and curiously from a nook in a hillside, and once as she darted away she had dropped a handkerchief and turned her head in time to see him pick it up; but she did not slacken her pace, or speak to him then or at all.

She rarely spoke, even to Timothy, but this was no barrier between them.  All the winter Timothy lived on the thoughts of the spring, and when the arbutus and Moira came back he poured out to her the strange treasures he had found in his heart.  Scarcely to her, for she only gazed silent at the stars as he talked.  Rather she seemed to unlock in him the rich stores of his own understanding and emotion.  He marveled that he could ever have found the valley empty.  He felt within him a swelling flood, ever renewed, of significance to fill all his world with a sweet and comforting meaning.

And so his red hair grew threaded with white, and his foolish, idle heart happier and happier as the years went on.  Then, one midwinter day, Father Delancey climbed the hill to say that Timothy’s sister’s husband was dead, and that Timothy was sent for to take his place, hold the Nebraska claim, work the land, and be a father to his sister’s children.  Timothy was stunned with horror, but the unbending will of the never-contradicted parish priest bore him along without question.