Oona shrieked, then sank back, cowering, and covered her eyes with her hands. Nial! Nial neither thought nor felt; he was stunned by a blank, bewildering amaze.
For what he saw, and what Oona had seen, was the drowned body and the dead face of ... Torcall Cameron!
In the awful, throbbing silence, broken only by the turmoil of the Linn and by the incessant moaning of the child, the dwarf stared as at some horrible impossibility.
It _could_ not be! Màm-Gorm, of all men in the world! Màm-Gorm, the great, strong, stern man of the hills! no, no, no--sure, it could not be! Moreover, as he knew, Màm-Gorm never left the hillside; in all the time he had known him, he had never come nigh the Linn o' Mairg, nor even near Mairg Water, and how could he be there? And would not Oona for sure have seen him that very morning in his own bed belike? Besides ... _Màm-Gorm_ ... it was as though the preaching-man were to cry out, "_There is no God!_"
At his ear he heard a moaning whisper: "_It is my doing; it is my doing._"
"Oona, Oona-lassie, is it mad that you will be!"
"O Nial, Nial, Nial! it is of me, this thing! Ay, sure--ay, sure! O arone! arone! it was I who left him sleeping nigh the Linn last night, thinking to make peace between him and the woman Anabal that is Alan's mother! And oh, oh, she has gone away in the gloaming not seeing him, and he will be for going home when he wakes, and will be calling _Oona, Oona, Oona_, and I not be hearing him, for I was away in the wood, with the fear upon me! And then he will be moving through the dark, and--and--O Nial, _Nial!_ He is drowned, drowned, and the water is on him because of _me_! Nial! Nial!"
The child swayed to and fro in her passionate grief. A new fear came upon Nial: that she might throw herself into the pool, to be drowned even as her foster-father was.
But at that moment both were hushed into staring silence.
Slowly the corpse began to sink again. Down, down it went, leaning forward more and more, till it seemed as though it were standing upright on some unseen ledge of rock. Then, gradually, it revolved further, till once more it hung suspended in the depths, face downward, and with stiff arms adroop beneath.
Without further gyration, motionlessly it seemed, the body sank, till it became blurred, obscure, shapeless. Then there was no more of it than a black shadow far down in the brown depths.