Then the mother said no more against it. She comforted her daughter with a word or two and one day in the winter of that year when she felt stronger than she had, forever after she was better in the cold than in the heat, she went and sought the gossip out. There the old gossip sat in her doorway, stitching flowers still upon a bit of cloth, although her thread was very coarse these days and the edge of the flowers she made a thing to laugh at for she could not see as once she had, although she would not say she could not, and when the mother found her she said wearily, “What you said was true. I see my maid would be better wed and let it be to that one you know, for I am too weary to look here and there, and always weary somehow nowadays since that flux took me a year or two agone.” Then the old gossip was glad to have something new to do that cost her nothing and she hired a barrow and on it rode the ten miles or so to the valley where her father’s house had been and to the village, and there she stayed a day or two and more. On the night when she returned she went to the mother’s house and called her out alone to the corner of the house and whispered, “The thing went very well, goodwife, and in a month it can be finished. Well, and I am very weary, too, but still I remember I did it all for you, goodwife, and we are old friends now.” Then the woman took from her bosom a piece of silver she had kept there for this hour and she pressed it on the gossip. But the gossip pushed her hand away and swore she would not have it and it was not needful between two friends and she said this and that but had it in the end. When all was done and the woman thought it well, or tried to, she told the son’s wife, and the son’s wife was pleased and showed it, although she took care to say, “You need not have hastened so, mother, for I bear the maid no ill will and she may stay here a year or two for all of me, and I would not mind if it were even all her life, if it were not we are so poor we must count the mouths we feed.” But she was more kindly for the while and she offered of her own will to sew new garments for the maid, three in all, a new coat and trousers of dark blue and some red trousers for her wedding day, as even the poorest maid must have, and besides these a pair of shoes or two, and on the shoes she made a little flower and leaf in red. But they made no great wedding day of it nor any great ado, since the maid was given free and there were no gifts given because she was not good bargain for the man she was to wed. As for the maid, she said nothing of the day. She listened when her mother told her what was done and she said nothing save once in the night she put out her hand to feel her mother’s face near her, and she whispered to her mother suddenly, “Mother, but is it too far for you to come and see me sometimes and how I do there? I am so blind I cannot come to you so far along a road I do not know and over hills and valleys.”