They carried her back to the Widow's house. She lay listlessly beneath many blankets, sipped at soup the Widow poured between her unresisting lips, turned her face from Ciag when he knelt by her bed and pressed her hand. A succession of staring faces that night—Ciag's always—and the Widow's—voices which whispered about her, and she could not hear; but she had heard such whispers before and cared nothing for them.

Then the storm passed and the day came, gray and cold. She rose up from her bed against the Widow's protest, walked out into the village. The place was deserted: all of them were up the hill at the making of Marik's—empty—cairn, among the others, on the hill's unhallowed left. She walked up the path and watched them at their work. Others moved away, but Ciag came and took her listless hand.

She gazed at the cairns; and Ciag softly lied—how Marik had been thrown from the boat when they came in among the rocks, how he had tried to save his brother. Mila turned on Ciag a face open and heartless, and drew back her hand, walked away down by the sea, in the roar of the rocks and the peace.

Ciag came down to her and dragged her back by the hand, while all the villagers stared and muttered—brother against brother, and the evil plain to see.

Mila came back and stood silent, went back to the village when they went, and surrendered to the Widow's care. She ate, listlessly, listlessly lay abed at evening; but when night came full and the Widow slept, she rose up and slipped out again in her shift, in the bitter cold, to walk along the shore, the lefthand way, below the cairns. She walked by the sea's edge in the tide pools, sat on a stone, gazing out to sea, and the waters, liquid black, reflected a pallid moon. So Ciag found her at dawn, and desperately took her hand. She turned on him a soulless smile and pulled away. Perhaps it was the place that daunted him. He stood. She walked away singing, but not the songs she had once sung—loose and tuneless, her singing now, like the sea. Villagers shied from her path. Barelimbed in her white shift she walked beside the boats and the nets. The Widow brought her a black shawl, brought her into the house, fed her and warmed her and dressed her in widow's black. Mila stroked her own red hair and sat drowsing until the warmth wearied her. Then she remembered the goats and went out again, but someone else had taken them to pasture.

She walked, singing her wild, wordless tune, and the winds played merrily among her black skirts, the fringes of her shawl, the strands of her bright hair. She hummed to herself, and fished by the rocks, and at times saw Ciag following. She ran finally, lightly eluding him—sat high among the cairns, among the black goats. The child watching them fled, leaving the place, and her. Ciag came, spoke to her madly, forlornly, and she stared through him, walked away, leaving the goats to stray where they would.

" Mila!" he cried, as he had cried that night.

She walked among the cairns and back down to the shore, and so to the village, among the hull-up boats, singing to herself, listening to the sea.

There was, that day, a second drowning: Agil's eldest son, fishing off the rocks, and no body washed ashore. Another cairn rose on the leftward side.

And on the day after that, Agil's grieving wife drowned herself, so that there was another. All the while the stones went into place on the hilltop there was the faint fair singing that was Mila, off along the rocks. The villagers did not speak of it—or of Ciag, absent from them. The luck had gone from Fin-galsey, and they knew it.

Ciag knew, and kept his lonely boat near the shore, on the fair days when he went out alone. It rocked, at times, out of time with wind and waves. Motions touched it which chilled his heart. Ripples passed round it, and splashes sounded when his back was turned. Untroubled, Mila walked the shore, walked the hills, sat among the cairns—by twilight walked the shore, when the last boats had come in.

He was there by night— he—the white shape beneath the darkling green: she bent low above the waters, reached fingers to pallor which might have been her own image, which vanished with the breaking of the surface. Bubbles swirled on the eddies, broke, vanished, the white shape gone, like a dream.

So all the days passed, one to the next. Only Ciag brought her gifts, his poor catches, from which she walked away, distractedly—and wherever she walked in the village the children shied away and the goats looked at her from wise slit eyes over the bars of the pen.

"I'll marry her," Ciag said to the Widow, as if that settled things.

"Ask her," the Widow said, staring at him from eyes wise as the black goats'. He did, and Mila stared through him and stirred the pot she had been set to stir, for she did such simple tasks for the Widow, moving without thought.

"She will not," the Widow said.

From that day Ciag grew desperate, spying on her when she would walk by the sea, never far from her—until all the village whispered in fear, not alone of her, but of Ciag. The winter winds blew and the waters heaved: no one ventured to sea, but two children drowned shell-hunting among the rocks, when the high surge ripped at the land. Storm drove at them, a great black wall of cloud coming far across the sea, and the mourning village shut its doors, its dead unfound, at twilight.

The wind came, the waves crashed on the shore for hours before the gale, and battered at the land. Boats which had always been safe were torn loose and threatened, and young men ran to save them.

Mila walked, along the shore. The rail had broken at the goats' pen. The beasts scampered free, on this side and on that of her, and up the hill, to huddle shivering and bleating among the cairns, staring after her, on the path which led to Fingal's Head, to the Teeth, and the sea. The air was full of spray. The waves thundered and streamed white off the rocks. She walked a dream, in which the cold was warmth, the night was clear, the curtains of wind-borne spray caressed her and desired. The voices in the sea sang siren-songs, male and female choruses. Her feet found the remembered rocks, her blinded eyes sought wraiths in the surge and the backspill. Knee-deep, hip-deep, tuggings of the surge at her skirts, and the voices singing. She fell down into the green thunder, a stinging flood into lungs and eyes and ears until the sea was all. Gentle hands reached out for her, pale limbs flashed, and hewrapped her close in his arms and bore her down.

There was no more pain. Cold arms and dark eyes, hair adrift like seaweed, and the beauty of him, the pale, chill beauty—she began to move, swifter, surer, pacing him, with a twisting torrent of pale bodies spiraling about them both in the green waters—large, deep eyes, delicate, jointed lips, and razor teeth that sparkled like shards of ice, hair flowing like torrents of shadow and pallor, dark and bright, mingling, as hers with his. Familiar faces, child-faces and old faces and faces she had never seen—father and drowned mother and kindred, all the lost souls of Fingalsey. . . .

And he—holding her fast. She laughed, and swept the currents, one with them and with him, her large eyes seeing the sea as she had never dreamed it, heart swelling with what she had never felt. She joined the song, loving the cold and the power of it.

She was there—at dawn Ciag found her pale, naked body face down among the rocks, her red hair flowing about her like some strange anemone. "Help," he cried to the villagers who lined the cliff in the foggy dawn. "Help me!"—because she was far out among the rocks, and her dead weight filled his arms.

But the Widow walked away, and his mother and his father, casting down their torches like falling stars, trailing smoke and fire into the sea; and one by one the others did so, deserting him, and her.