I had dropped down under the shelter of the wall on to a stone opposite, and at those words looked at her with interest indeed. She--this coarsened, wasted, suspiciously scented woman of the town--the mother of that sweet, sunny child I had just seen married. And again instinctively silent about my own presence at the wedding, I murmured: "I thought I saw some confetti in that farmyard as I came up the lane." She laughed again. "Confetti--that's the little pink and white and blue things--plenty o' that," and she added fiercely: "My own brother didn' know me--let alone my girl. How should she?--I haven't seen her since she was a baby--she was a laughin' little thing," and she gazed past me with that look in the eyes as of people who are staring back into the bygone. "I guess we was laughin' when we got her. 'Twas just here--summer-time. I 'ad the moon in my blood that night, right enough." Then, turning her eyes on my face, she added: "That's what a girl _will_ 'ave, you know, once in a while, and like as not it'll du for her. Only thirty-five now, I am, an' pretty nigh the end o' my tether. What can you expect?--I'm a gay woman. Did for me right enough. Her father's dead, tu." "Do you mean," I said, "because of your child?" She nodded. "I suppose you can say that. They made me bring an order against him. He wouldn't pay up, so he went and enlisted, an' in tu years 'e was dead in the Boer War--so it killed him right enough. But there she is, a sweet sprig if ever there was one. That's a strange thing, isn't it?" And she stared straight before her in a sudden silence. Nor could _I_ find anything to say, slowly taking in the strangeness of this thing. That girl, so like a sunbeam, of whom the people talked as though she were a blessing in their lives--her coming into life to have been the ruin of the two who gave her being! The woman went on dully: "Funny how I knew she was goin' to be married--'twas a farmer told me--comes to me regular when he goes to Exeter market. I always knew he came from near my old home. 'There's a weddin' on Tuesday,' 'e says, 'I'd like to be the bridegroom at. Prettiest, sunniest maid you ever saw'; an' he told me where she come from, so I knew. He found me a bit funny that afternoon. But he don't know who I am, though he used to go to school with me; I'd never tell, not for worlds." She shook her head vehemently. "I don't know why I told you; I'm not meself to-day, and that's a fact." At her half-suspicious, half-appealing look, I said quickly: "I don't know a soul about here. It's all right."