One day the gossip who was a widow came to the mother and she said, “Goodwife, if you would like to wed that blind maid of yours, I know a family in the hills to the north and they have a son seventeen or so now. They came in famine times from a northern province and they settled on some wild public land not in our village at the mountain’s foot, but up a little higher, and after a while a brother came, and there they live. The land is poor and they are poor, but so be you poor, too, goodwife, and your maid blind, and if you will only pay my going I will go and see to it for you. The truth is I have been minded for this long time to go home and see my own father’s house, but I am loath to ask my husband’s brother for the bit to do it with. A very hard thing is it to be widow in another’s house.” At first the mother would not listen and she said loudly, “I can tend my own blind maid, goodwife!” This afterwards she told her cousin’s wife and the cousin too, but the cousin looked grave a while and he said at last, “So could you tend her if you lived forever, sister, but when you are dead, and we dead too, perhaps, or very old and not masters any more before our children save in name, then who will tend her? And what if bad years come and parents must think first of their own children, and you gone?” Then the mother was silent. But soon she saw the truth that she could not live forever, at any time her life might end, the sooner, too, perhaps, because she had never had her own old vigor since that secret night. In the summer of that year a flux came out of the air and laid its hold upon her. Ever she had loved to eat and eat heartily and all she wanted of what there was. But that summer came more than usually hot and there was a mighty pest of flies, so many everywhere that the winds blew them in the food and flies were mingled whether one would have it so or not, and the mother cried out at last to let them be, for there was no use in killing them and it was but a waste of time so many more came after. It was a summer, too, of great watermelons that when they were split showed darkly red or clear and yellow as their sort was, and never had there been a better year for melons than was that. Now well the mother loved this fruit, and she ate heartily of all such as could not be sold or such as grew too ripe suddenly beneath the sun, and she ate on and on and when she was filled, she ate yet more to keep the things from being wasted. Whether it was the many melons or whether some wicked wind caught her or whether someone laid a curse upon her, although she did not know of one who really hated her unless it were that little goddess who had guessed her sin, or what it was she did not know. But the flux came on her and it dragged her very inwards out and she lay ill for days, purged and retching up so much as a mouthful of tea she swallowed to stay herself if she could.