followed were women, and as to their heads they were beyond all
beauty, but as to their bodies they were but shadows without life,
and their long hair was moving and trembling about them, as if it
lived with some terrible life of its own. And then the mist rose of a
sudden and hid them, and then a light gust of wind blew them away
towards the north-east, and covered Hanrahan at the same time with a
white wing of cloud.

He stood up trembling and was going to turn away from the valley,
when he saw two dark and half-hidden forms standing as if in the air
just beyond the rock, and one of them that had the sorrowful eyes of
a beggar said to him in a woman's voice, 'Speak to me, for no one in
this world or any other world has spoken to me for seven hundred
years.'

'Tell me who are those that have passed by,' said Hanrahan.

'Those that passed first,' the woman said, 'are the lovers that had
the greatest name in the old times, Blanad and Deirdre and Grania and
their dear comrades, and a great many that are not so well known but
are as well loved. And because it was not only the blossom of youth
they were looking for in one another, but the beauty that is as
lasting as the night and the stars, the night and the stars hold them
for ever from the warring and the perishing, in spite of the wars and
the bitterness their love brought into the world. And those that came
next,' she said, 'and that still breathe the sweet air and have the
mirrors in their hearts, are not put in songs by the poets, because
they sought only to triumph one over the other, and so to prove their
strength and beauty, and out of this they made a kind of love. And as
to the women with shadow-bodies, they desired neither to triumph nor