Mother Elsie came to him out of the dusk in that wuthering place just like a drifting mist, as he said. She gave him no greeting, but was by his side in silence. Before he knew what she was doing she had the soles of her feet upon his, and her hands folding his, and her eyes burning against his like hot coals against ash. He felt shudders come over him, and a wind blew up and down his back; and he grew giddy, and heard the roaring of the tides in his ears. Then he was quiet. Her voice was very far away when she said this thing, but he remembered every word of it: By that which dwells within thee, By the lamps that shine upon me, By the white light I see litten From the brain now sleeping stilly, By the silence in the hollows, By the wind that slow subsideth, By the life-tide slowly ebbing, By the deith-tide slowly rising, By the slowly waning warmth, By the chill that slowly groweth, By the dusk that slowly creepeth, By the darkness near thee, By the darkness round thee, By the darkness o'er thee-- O'er thee, round thee, on thee-- By the one that standeth At thy side and waiteth Dumb and deaf and blindly, By the one that moveth, Bendeth, raiseth, watcheth, By the dim Grave-Spell upon thee, By the Silence thou hast wedded.... May the way thy feet are treading, May the tangled lines now crookèd, Clear as moonlight lie before me! _Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! green the branches bonnie: Oh! oh! ohrone! ochrone! red the blood-drop berries: Achrone, arone, arone, arone, I see the green-clad Lady. She walks the road that's wet with tears, with rustling sorrows shady.... Oh! oh! mo ghraidh._ Then it was that a great calm came upon Fergus, though he felt like a drowned man, or as one who stood by his own body, but speechless, and feeling no blowing of wind through his shadow-frame. For, indeed, though the body lived, he was already of the company of the silent. What was that _caiodh_, that wailing lamentation, sad as the _Cumha fir Arais_, which followed Elsie's incantation, her spell upon "the way" before him, that it and all the trailed lines of this life should be clear as moonlight before her? _Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! red the blood-drop berries_; did not these mean no fruit of the quicken-tree, but the falling drops from the maimed tree that was himself? And was not the green-clad lady, she who comes singing low, the sprouting of the green grass that is the hair of the earth? And was not the road, gleaming wet with ruts and pools all of tears, and overhung by dark rustling plumes of sorrow, the road that the soul traverses in the dark hour? And did not all this mean that the Grave Spell was already upon him, and that the Silence was to be his?[10]