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. The gloaming, creeping from under the bracken and down from amid the branches of the pines, had begun to fill the forest with veils of shadow. It was for this Oona had waited. Gently disparting the bracken, and, herself almost as insubstantial and soundless as a shadow, with one swift glance around her, she vanished into the darkness that involved the columnar pine-glades. In the dim, fragrant May-bloom there seemed nothing astir save white moths, which flickered from bush to bush. The deer, if any were there, were resting; the roosting black-cock were as silent as the doves. The remoter dusk was full of the voices of the wind, but those distant aerial sounds were as the wings that fan the courts of Silence. Shadow after shadow moved out of the twilight: soft velvety things, though intangible, that lay drowsily upon the boughs of the pines, or slipped after each other through the intricacies of the fern.