Was it fear?
or what was it?
She gazed with big eyes fixed on his face, heeding neither him nor his words, and Donal, struck silent, gazed in return.

At length, after a pause of strange import, her soul seemed to return into her deep-set grey eyes, and in a broken voice, low, and solemn, and fraught with mystery, she said, "Donal, it's the broonie!" Donal's mouth opened wide at the word, but the tenor of his thought it would have been hard for him to determine.

Celtic in kindred and education, he had listened in his time to a multitude of strange tales, both indigenous and exotic, and, Celtic in blood, had been inclined to believe every one of them for which he could find the least _raison d'etre_.

But at school he had been taught that such stories deserved nothing better than mockery, that to believe them was contrary to religion, and a mark of such weakness as involved blame.

Nevertheless, when he heard the word broonie issue from a face with such an expression as Jean's then wore, his heart seemed to give a gape in his bosom, and it rushed back upon his memory how he had heard certain old people talk of the brownie that used, when their mothers and grandmothers were young, to haunt the Mains of Glashruach.