She turned and stepped hastily to the stove from which rose an appetizing smell of frying ham. As she bent her plump, flushed face over this, the door opened and two dark-eyed little girls darted in. On seeing a stranger, they were frozen in mid-flight with the shy gaze of country children.
"Here, childer, 'tis Piper Tim come back to visit us. Piper Tim that I've told ye so many tales about--an' the gran' tunes he can play on his pipes. He can play with ye better nor I--he niver has aught else to do!" She smiled a wide, friendly smile on the old man as she said this, to show she meant no harm, and turned the slices of ham deftly so that they sent a puff of blue savory smoke up to her face. "Don't th' ham smell good, ye spalpeens, fresh from runnin' th' hills? Go an' wash ye'r faces an' hands and call ye'r father an' brothers. I've four," she added proudly to the man by the table watching her with horrified eyes.
The fumes of the cooking made him sick, the close air suffocated him. He felt as though he were in some oppressive nightmare, and the talk at the supper-table penetrated but dully to his mind. The cordiality of Moira's husband, the shy, curious looks of the children at his pipes, even Moira's face rosy from brow to rounded chin, and beaming with indulgent, affectionate interest all melted together into a sort of indistinguishable confusion. This dull distress was rendered acute anguish by Moira's talk. In that hot, indoor place, with all those ignorant blank faces about her, she spoke of the pines and the upland bogs, of the fog and the Round Stone, and desecrated a sacred thing with every word.
It would have been a comfort to him if she had even talked with an apostate's yearning bitterness for his betrayed religion, if she had spoken harshly of their old, sweet folly; but she was all kindness and eager, willing reminiscence. Just as she spoke his name, his faëry name of "Piper Tim," in a tone that made it worse than "Uncle Tim," so she blighted one after another of the old memories as she held them up in her firm, assured hands, and laughed gently at their oddity.
After supper as Tim sat again in the kitchen watching her do the evening work, the tides of revulsion rose strong within him. "We were a queer lot, an' no mistake, Piper Tim," she said, scraping at a frying pan with a vigorous knife. "An' the childer are just like us. I've thried to tell them some of our old tales, but--I dun'no'--they've kind o' gone from me, now I've such a lot to do. I suppose you were up to the same always, with your nephews an' nieces out West. 'Twas fine for ye to have a family of your own that way, you that was always so lonely like."