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’ tunes he can play on his pipes.  He can play with ye better nor I—­he niver has aught else to do!” She smiled a wide, friendly smile on the old man as she said this, to show she meant no harm, and turned the slices of ham deftly so that they sent a puff of blue savory smoke up to her face.  “Don’t th’ ham smell good, ye spalpeens, fresh from runnin’ th’ hills?  Go an’ wash ye’r faces an’ hands and call ye’r father an’ brothers.  I’ve four,” she added proudly to the man by the table watching her with horrified eyes.

The fumes of the cooking made him sick, the close air suffocated him.  He felt as though he were in some oppressive nightmare, and the talk at the supper-table penetrated but dully to his mind.  The cordiality of Moira’s husband, the shy, curious looks of the children at his pipes, even Moira’s face rosy from brow to rounded chin, and beaming with indulgent, affectionate interest all melted together into a sort of indistinguishable confusion.  This dull distress was rendered acute anguish by Moira’s talk.  In that hot, indoor place, with all those ignorant blank faces about her, she spoke of the pines and the upland bogs, of the fog and the Round Stone, and desecrated a sacred thing with every word.