But Oona watched for the white shimmer, for the magic song. She looked everywhere save where the white merle nested--in the fair soul of her; listened everywhere save where its secret song was--in the music of her young life in heart and brain. Ah, the sweet song of it! As for Nial, he crouched for hours at a time, lest by noon or dusk he might hear or see the magic bird. If only he could catch but a glimpse of the white merle, sure he would see his lost soul somewhere among the green spirits who, Oona said, would be seen coming out of the trees which were their bodies. Neither did _he_ know that there was one place where it rested often on a spray in its singing flight, a fugitive Hope; or that notes of its unreachable song pierced the gloom of his bitter pain. Sorcha alone, only Sorcha, started at times as though she heard it: and in her dreams, and in the dreams of Alan, it sang, a white wonder on a golden bough, in the moonlight. But for Torcall Cameron in his sorrow there was no white merle. Oona asked him once what its first notes were like. "_Bron! bron! mo bron!_" he answered; "mo bron, mo bron, ochone, arone! Doil-ghios orm'sa, tha mo chridhe briste!"[10] [10] "Grief, my grief! O grief, my grief, ochone, arone! Sorrow upon me, my heart is broken!" Almost every afternoon he went out alone upon the heights, though never again by the cairn where Marsail lay. Sometimes he would sit on a boulder, brooding dark; at times Sorcha or Oona would descry him kneeling in the heather, often with fierce gestures, as he prayed wild prayers--fragments of which the wind sometimes bore to the listener, who no more durst approach. Ever since that day by the cairn Nial had kept out of his way. Not without reason; for once, as the dwarf lay sleeping in the noon-heat, under the shadow of a rock, he was suddenly seized in an iron grip. It was in vain for him to struggle. What he saw in the face of his captor gave him the courage of desperation. "Let me go, Màm-Gorm!" he muttered in a voice hoarse with passion. "Let me go. I am Nial of the woods." "Ay, Nial of the woods! Spawn of the Evil One! Think you I don't know you to be the child of the Cailliach? You talk of your lost soul, poor fool! Your _lost_ soul, you that never had and never will have a soul!" "Let me go, Màm-Gorm!" "Let you go! and where will I be letting you go to, you that are no man, but only an elfish creature of the woods? Was it _you_ that came out of the grave that day--that day by the cairn?" "And what will you do, Màm-Gorm?" "What will I do? What will I do? By the blood on my soul, I will drive a stake through your body, so that no more shall you haunt the living!" "Let me go, Torcall Cameron, in the name of God!" The blind man relaxed his grip a little, which had become like a vice. The words brought a shock to his heart. He had never heard Nial call him by his name before: and if he were of demon birth, how could he say "an ainm an Athar"?