With a heavy swaying motion of his head he muttered: "_Anam nathrach, Anam nathrach!_"[7] [7] "Serpent-soul, serpent-soul!" Pronounce àn' ŭm nàa-rach. _Nathrach_ is the genitive of _nàthair_ (pronounced _nha_'er, or a'_er_ nasally). But when the adder saw a crevice elsewhere, that promised better, and swiftly wriggled to it, Nial saw that it was only a crawling beast, this and nothing more. With a dart like a hawk he seized it by the tail, swung it round his head while he shouted, "_Droch spadadh ort! Droch spadadh ort! Bad death to you! Bad death to you!_" and flung it against the face of the rock, so that when it fell across a bracken it lay as though stunned or dead. A shout of elfish laughter came from Oona, who had sprung from her covert, and watched Nial's discomfiture with malicious glee. He turned slowly. His corrugated brows were knitted grotesquely, as with dull bewildered eyes he stared in the direction of the laughter. With a furtive motion he kept shifting his weight now to one foot, now to another, occasionally dragging one backward as though pawing the ground. His tormentor knew well these signs of perplexity, and her light tantalizing glee rippled afresh across the glade. She stood knee-deep in bracken, with her right hand clasping the black-and-silver bough of a birk: a golden-green hue upon her from beneath from the sunlit fern; upon her from above a flood of yellow sunshine, so that she stood out like a human flower, a new daffodil of the woods. The wild, rude, misshapen creature who fronted her seemed less human now than his wont, with that bovine stare, that uncouth guise, his over-large and heavy head slowly swaying, his restless stamping and scraping. Suddenly it dawned upon him that Oona had not been in earnest: that she had played with, and now mocked him. His eyes grew red, as those of wild swine do of a sudden, or as those of an angry badger. A spray of froth blew from his hanging lip. His long horny fingers opened and closed like sheathing and unsheathing claws. The next moment there stirred in his brain the thought that perhaps, after all, Oona was mocking him because he had lost, perhaps even because he, he himself, had destroyed his long-sought and moment-agone found soul. With a cry he threw himself on the ground, sobbing convulsively. He lay there like a stricken beast, a quivering ungainly heap. It was no unknowing beast, though, that moaned, over and over, "_My soul--my soul--my soul!_" Great tears, like a stag's, ran down his furrowed cheeks. Oona stood amazed. Here was no frenzy of blind rage such as she had seen at times in her companion; but passionate grief: sobs, tears.