Suddenly the dancer stopped. She stood in that exquisite poise of arrested motion which for a moment the wave has when it lifts its breast against the wind. Intently she listened: with eyes dilated and nostrils swiftly expanding and contracting, like any wild thing of the woodlands.
A voice, strangely harsh in its high, thin falsetto, resounded from the upper glades.
The child smiled, relaxed from her intent attitude, and listlessly moved a step or two forward.
"It is Nial," she muttered. "I don't want him. I am tired of helping him to look for his soul."
The words came from her lips in smileless earnestness. To her, evidently, so fantastical a quest had nothing in it of surprise or strangeness.
The startled roe had already fled. The merest rustle of the bracken hinted the whither-away of its flight. Instinctively, Oona noticed the sound, and her eyes looked beyond a distant clump of pines in time to see a gleam of something brown leap out of and into the tall fern, as a seabird among green running billows.
Almost simultaneously she caught a glimpse of an uncouth dwarfish figure moving slowly through the pine-glades.
Swift as a bird to its covert she slipped into the dusk of the neighbouring savannah of bracken.
The voice was nearer, but from its greater lift in the air the child knew that Nial had stopped, and was doubtless looking about him. She made no response. If the searcher were but ten yards away he would not have discovered her. No fox among the root crannies, no hare crouching low in her form, could have more easily evaded detection.
The voice was now further away. Clearly Nial had turned westward, and was moving through the glade beyond the pool. Once more she heard the harsh, thin voice; but now it was crooning a song wherewith she was familiar, the words of which simulated the plaining of the wild-dove:
"_Oona, Oona, mo ghraidh: Oona, Oona, mo ghraidh: Mùirnean, Mùirnean, Mùirnean, Oona, Oona, mo ghraidh!_"
Then the silence closed in about her again. A relative silence, for she heard the hum of the brown bee drowsily fumbling to its nest under a bramble, the whir of the stag-moth, the innumerable indeterminate rustle and hum of the woodlands in summer. The cushats crooned ever and again, hushfully nestling amid the green dusk of the boughs. A fernowl swooped through the glades, whence already the sunset light had vanished, and after every short flight it would poise on a pine-branch and emit its resonant whir. In the hollow where Oona lay there was still no breath of air; but overhead the wind stirred the plumes of every tree-crest, and its voice, vibrant, full of rising and falling flute-like calls, loudly surgent, haunting-sweet, was audible on all sides and beyond upon the uplands of Iolair.