Up by the Round Stone the valley opened out beneath him.  Restlessly he looked up and down the road and across the valley with a questing glance which did not show him what he sought.  The night for all its dark corners had nothing in it for him beyond what lay openly before him.  He put out his hand instinctively for his pipes, remembered that he had left them at the house, and sprang to his feet to return for them.  Perhaps Moira would come out with him now.  Perhaps the child had gone to sleep.  The brief stay in the ample twilight of the hillside had given him a faint, momentary courage to appeal again to her against the narrow brightness of her prison.

Moira sat by the kitchen table, sewing, her smooth round face blooming like a rose in the light from the open door of the stove.  Her kindly eyes beamed sweetly on the old man.  “Ah, Piper Tim, ye’re wise.  ’Tis a damp night out for ye’r rheumatis.  The fog risin’ too, likely?”

The old piper went to her chair and stood looking at her with a fixed gaze, “Moira!” he said vehemently, “Moira O’Donnell that was, the stars are bright over the Round Stone, an’ th’ moon is risin’ behind th’ Hill o’ Delights, and the first white puffs of incense are risin’ from th’ whirl-hole of th’ river.  I’ve come back for my pipes, and I’m goin’ out to play to th’ little people—­an’ oh, shall old Piper Tim go without Moira?”

He spoke with a glowing fervor like the leaping up of a dying candle.  From the inexorably kind woman who smiled so friendly on him his heart recoiled and puffed itself out into darkness.  She surveyed him with the wise, tender pity of a mother for a foolish, much-loved child.  “Sure, ‘tis th’ same Piper Tim ye are!” she said cheerfully, laying down her work, “but, Lord save ye, Timmy darlint, Moira’s grown up!  There’s no need for my pretendin’ to play any more, is there, when I’ve got proper childer o’ my own to keep it up. They are my little people—­an’ I don’t have to have a quiet place to fancy them up out o’ nothin’.  They’re real!  An’ they’re takin’ my place all over again.  There’s one—­the youngest girl—­the one that looks so like me as ye noticed—­she’s just such a one as I was.  To-day only (she’s seven to-morrow), she minded me of some old tales I had told her about the cruachan whistle for the sidhe on the seventh birthday, an’ she’d been tryin’ to make one, but I’d clean forgot how the criss-cross lines go.  It made me think back on that evening when I was seven—­maybe you’ve forgot, but you was sittin’ on the Round Stone in th’——­”

Timothy’s sore heart rebelled at this last rifling of the shrine, and he made for the door.  Moira’s sweet solicitude held him for an instant in check.  “Oh, Tim, ye’d best stay in an’ warm your knee by the good fire.  I’ve a pile of mendin’ to do, and you’ll tell me all about your family in th’ West and how you farmed there.  It’ll be real cozy-like.”

Timothy uttered an outraged sound and snatching up his pipes fled out of the pleasant, low-ceilinged room, up the road, now white as chalk beneath the newly risen moon.  At the Round Stone he sat down and, putting his pipes to his lips, he played resolutely through to the end “The Song of Angus to the Stars.”  As the last, high, confident note died, he put his pipes down hastily, and dropped his face in his hands with a broken murmur of Gaelic lament.