“I will not refuse this woman to you, if you long for her,” she said, “for I know that everything that is new seems fair, and everything that is common seems bitter, and everything we have not seems desirable to us, and everything we have we think little of. And yet, Cuchulainn, I was once pleasing to you, and I would wish to be so again.” Her grief touched him. “By my word,” he said, “you are pleasing to me, and will be as long as I live.” “Then let me be given up,” said Fand. “It is better that I should be,” replied Emer. “No,” said Fand; “it is I who must be given up in the end. “It is I who will go, though I go with great sorrow. I would rather stay with Cuchulainn than live in the sunny home of the gods. “O Emer, he is yours, and you are worthy of him! What my hand cannot have, my heart may yet wish well to. “A sorrowful thing it is to love without return. Better to renounce than not to receive a love equal to one’s own. “It was not well of you, O fair-haired Emer, to come to kill Fand in her misery.” It was while the goddess and the human woman were contending with one another in self-sacrifice that Manannán, Son of the Sea, heard of Fand’s trouble, and was sorry that he had forsaken her. So he came, invisible to all but her alone. He asked her pardon, and she herself could not forget that she had once been happy with the “horseman of the crested waves”, and still might be happy with him again. The god asked her to make her choice between them, and, when she went to him, he shook his mantle between her and Cuchulainn. It was one of the magic properties of Manannán’s mantle that those between whom it was shaken could never meet again. Then Fand returned with her divine husband to the country of the immortals; and the druids of Emain Macha gave Cuchulainn and Emer each a drink of oblivion, so that Cuchulainn forgot his love and Emer her jealousy.[217]