Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/333

 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.