When the sunbeams came dancing and leaping in the track of the wind, the note of exultation, in deepening, became more indiscriminate. The bleating of the stags, the lowing of the distant kye, the plaintive crying of the ewes and lambs, the calls and songs of the birds, the myriad indeterminate voice of morning, blent in a universal rumour of joy.
Nial stood listening intently, now to this sound, now to that. He knew the forest, and the life of the forest, as no other man could do. He, too, was a woodlander, as much as the deer, or the shy cushat, or the very bracken.
The birds that flew by paid no heed to him. He was watching a young fox blinking its yellow eyes from under a hollow mass of roots, when a roe trotted rapidly close by him, her hill-pool eyes alert, her long neck strained, her nostrils distended and quivering. He turned, but she did not swerve nor hasten. Her fawn followed. It stopped almost opposite to Nial, looked at him curiously, lifted its delicate forehead alternately, and sniffed with swift sensitive twitchings. He looked quietly into the great violet eyes, filled with a wonderful living amber when turned against the sun. The fawn slowly advanced till the velvety warmth of its lips nibbled playfully at the arm, gently extended toward it. The dwarf stroked the smooth muzzle and the long twitching ears. Suddenly, with an elfish whisk, the fawn sprang to one side, spun with abrupt sidelong leaps around the funny two-legged creature: then, finding that its new playmate was so perplexingly staid, leaped away in a light bounding flight in pursuit of its dam, who had halted among the bracken, and had been watching curiously, but unalarmedly.
Strangely, it was with a look more of resentment than of pleasure that Nial turned and walked slowly toward the upper glades.
There was no one there to overhear his muttered words. Perhaps the wood-doves that watched him pass, listened unheedingly to his angry exclamations--half sobs, half vague outcries against the bitterness of his fate that he, Nial the Soulless, was shunned by all human beings, or by all save the child Oona, and treated as though he were a wild thing of the woods--and that even the creatures of the hillsides and the forest-glades knew him, while not of their own fellowship, to be no human.