In these days when she was so racked and weak the son’s wife did all well and everything she knew to do for her husband’s mother’s sake, nor was she lacking in any small duty. The blind maid strove to do her poor best too for her mother, but she was slow and could not see a need in time, and often the son’s wife pushed the maid aside and said, “Do you sit down somewhere, good sister, and out of my way, for I swear you are the most help so!” Even against her will then did the mother come to lean, in all her weakness, on this quick and careful younger woman, and she was too weak to defend her blind maid, and the younger son these days came but sometimes to see how she did and went away again somewhere because his mother was too weak to say a word for him against his brother. In such weakness it was a strength to the mother to feel the young wife deft and careful about her bed. When at last the flux passed out of her and to some other person destined for it, and the mother rose at last, she leaned hard upon her son’s wife, though she did not love her either, but only needed her. It took the mother very long to come somewhat to herself again, and she was never wholly sound again. She could not eat the rough cabbages she loved, nor any sort of melon nor the peanuts she had liked to chew raw from the ground when they were dug, and ever after this she had to think what she ate, to see how it suited itself to her inwards, and if she grew impatient with such finicking and cried out that she would eat what she would and liked and her belly must bear it, why, then the flux came back again. Or even if she worked too hard or sat in any small cold wind that evil illness waited for her and made her helpless for a while again. Then in her helplessness she saw the blind maid must be wed into some house of her own, for it was true she was not welcome here. When the mother was too weak to cry against it, she saw the maid was ill at ease there and felt herself unwanted, and one day the maid came herself at a moment when her mother was alone and she said, “Mother, I cannot stay here in my brother’s house. Oh, mother, I think I would sooner be wed anywhere so that I could be somewhere I was wanted!”