So the maid went away, and she held her sign of blindness in her hand, and had her little roll of garments tied behind her on the ass’s back. The mother stood and watched her go, her heart aching past belief, tears welling from her eyes, and this although she did not know what else she could have done. So she stood still until the hill rose between and cut the child from her sight and she saw her no more. XVI Now must the mother somehow make her days full to ease the fears she had and to forget the emptiness where once the blind maid had sat. Silent the house seemed and silent the street where she could not hear the clear plaintive sound of the small bell her daughter struck whenever she went out. And the mother could not bear it. She went to the land again, against her elder son’s will, and when he saw her take her hoe he said, “Mother, you need not work, it shames me to have you work in the field and others see you there when you are aged.” But she said with her old anger, “I am not so aged--let me work to ease myself. Do you not see how I must ease myself?” Then the man answered in his stubborn way, “To me you seem to grieve for what is not so, my mother, and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come.” But the mother answered with a sort of heavy listlessness that did not leave her nowadays, “You do not understand. You who are young--you understand nothing at all.” The young man looked dazed at his mother then, not knowing what she meant, but she would say no more, but went and took a hoe and plodded out across the fields in silence. But it was true she could not work hard any more, for when she did her sweat poured out, and when the wind blew on her, even a warm wind, it sent a chill upon her and she was soon ill again with her flux. So must she bear her idleness and she worked no more when she was well again, but sat in the doorway idle. There was no need for her to lift her hand about the house, since the son’s wife did all and did all well and carefully. She did all well, the mother thought unwillingly, except she bore no child. The mother sitting empty there looked restlessly about that threshold where once she had been wont to see her little children tumbling in their play, and all day long she sat and remembered the days gone, and how once she had sat so young and filled with life and work, her man there, her babes, she the young wife and another the old mother. Then her man was gone and never heard from--and she winced and turned her mind from that, and then she thought how empty it seemed now, the elder son in the field all day or bickering at harvest with the landlord’s agent, some new fellow, a little weazened cousin of the landlord’s, people said--she never looked at him--and her blind maid gone, and her younger son gone always in the town and seldom home.