Then there came a summer when he was hardly ever seen at Mr. Morrison's house. He lived like an outcast, and was seldom met save by a mountain shepherd, or by the two highest hill-dwellers, the widow Anabal Gilchrist on Tornideon, and Torcall Cameron of Màm-Gorm on Wester Iolair. Fitting company, it was said; for Anabal and Torcall were not only voluntarily isolated from the folk of the strath, and held themselves strangely aloof, but were at bitter feud the one with the other. That autumn a band of gypsies came to the strath. Some were brown-skinned and of foreign race; others were of northern blood and birth: a few were Celtic waifs, who had the Gaelic as their familiar speech. When the people of the dust, or the children of the wind, as the Highlanders call these vagrant folk--though commonly by the first designation--moved away again, traceless as is their wont, they took Nial with them. The winter passed, the spring, summer came again, and with the waning of autumn there was still no sign of the changeling. Year after year went by: and the story of Nial, or Nicor the Soulless, as he was often named, became vaguer and vaguer. It was nigh upon fifteen years later that he was seen once more in the strath. No one had heard of his return; no one knew of it except perhaps Torcall Cameron and his daughter Sorcha, or Anabal Gilchrist and her son Alan; when one day Murdo, Màm-Gorm's shepherd, came along the strath with the news that, as he strode through the forest at dawn, he had descried Nial--a ragged, fantastically deformed dwarf, aged in appearance as though he were one of "the other people" who lived in the heart of the hills. He had recognized him in a moment; but had not spoken with him because when he saw the creature it was stealing furtively from pine-bole to pine-bole, and sometimes tapping and listening intently, or muttering. "And what would that be meaning?" asked every one to whom he told his tale, though there was not one who did not know the answer aforehand. "It means that he was looking for his soul--for the soul that the Cailliach won out of him and hid for ever in a pine-tree, where neither he nor any one else would be like to find it." "Until the tree falls, by the hand of man, or by the lightning or the wind," some one would add: but at this Murdo would only shake his head, and say that the _beansìth_ had for sure chosen a tree that neither wind nor flame could easily reach, and that when, after hundreds of years, it would be dying, it would die from within, and so kill the soul that wailed and wept or lay spellbound in misery within. Thereafter Nial was occasionally seen. Weeks went by: summer passed, and autumn: and it was clear that he had come back to stay, though he never once drew near the house of old Mr. Morrison, nor even sought out his foster-father anywhere, nor held converse with any one save at Màm-Gorm.