"Ay, sure." "Oona, Oona, is it dead? Oona, birdeen, Oona-mo-gràidh, it may--it _may be living_! O Oona, the white soul o' me--white as you, my fawn!" The blue eyes glanced up from the pool, and at the speaker. She looked at him, then downward again. "Nial!" "Yes ... yes, Oona ..." "The wood-maid has been playing with you." "No, no, no--that is not a true word on your lips!" "Sure, a true thing it is. Look, Nial; see how big it is. The white face of it is yonder by the salmon-hole, and one foot is moving against the rock below us!" "And what of that! Sure, it is a beautiful soul, dead or alive; and big as a man's should be, and fair and white and strong!" "Nial ... Nial ... it may be alive, for I see its hands moving ... but ... but"--and here tears came into the child's eyes, and her voice shook with sorrow for her hapless friend--"but ... oh, Nial ... so big a soul will never be able to creep into _your_ body ... for you are small, dear, small, and--and ... an' then _it_ is so big and strong!" Alas, the pity of it! Never once had Nial thought of this; never had he dreamed that so large a soul could not get into his dwarfish, misshapen frame. He stared in wild amaze, first at Oona, then at the drowned thing in the water--his soul, or a phantom, or a body, or mayhap the kelpie, he knew not which, now--then at Oona again. A fierce pain was in his eyes. He bit his lip, in the way he did whenever Màm-Gorm struck him--a thing that had not been for months past. A little rivulet of blood trickled into his thin matted beard, tangled and twisted this way and that like a goat's. "Nial! Nial!" moaned Oona pitifully. "Ay, it is true ... that is a true thing that you will be saying, Oona. Sure, it would need to be a soul as small as your own that would do for poor Nial." "No, no, Nial!" cried the child comfortingly, "bigger than mine, _really, really_--yes, and ... and ... fatter!" A sob shook his heavy frame. Oh, the long seeking, and the near goal, and the bitter futile finding! Still, Oona's sympathy was sweet. Dear birdeen that she was, to say he would have a bigger soul than hers, bigger and fatter too! But, no, he thought--no, better to have one the same as Oona's, for all he was so much older and bigger and stronger than she was. "Ah, Oona-mùirnean, if I could only find my soul at all--anywhere, anywhere!" "But you _will_ find it, Nial! You _will_ find it! Sorcha told me that you are _sure_ to find it. Never mind what they say down there in the Strath. What do _they_ know about souls? And ... and ... Nial!" "Yes, my birdeen." "If ... if ... you _can't_ find your soul anywhere--and all this summer we'll go seeking, seeking, for it, till we have listened at every tree in the forest and on the mountain-side--if you _can't_ find it anywhere, _I am going to marry you_!"