“It should be taken out to sun, if it is sheepskin,” she muttered, sore at the thought of waste if the moth should creep in and gnaw good skins. But she did not dare to open it and so she let it be. And still her son did not come. So passed the days until a month was gone and she was near beside herself and would have been completely so, except that something came to wean her mind somewhat from her fears. It was the last thing she dreamed of nowadays and it was that her son’s wife conceived. Yes, after all these cool years the woman came to herself and did her duty. The elder son went to his mother importantly one day as she sat in the doorway and said, his lean face all wrinkled with his smiles, “Mother, you shall have a grandson.” She came out of the heavy muse in which she spent her days now and stared at him out of eyes grown a little filmy and said peevishly, “You speak like a fool. Your wife is cold as any stone and as barren and where my little son is I do not know and he scatters his good seed anywhere and will not wed and save it.” Then the elder son coughed and said plainly, “Your son’s wife has conceived.” At first the mother would not believe it. She looked at this elder son of hers and then she shouted, pulling at her staff to raise herself upon her feet, “She has not--I never will believe it!” But she saw by his face that it was true and she rose and went as fast as she could and found her son’s wife who was chopping leeks in the kitchen and she peered at the young woman and she cried, “Have you something in you then at last?” The wife nodded and went on with her work, her pale face spotted with dull red, and then the mother knew it to be true. She said, “How long have you known?” “Two moons and more,” the young wife answered. Then the old mother fell into a rage to think she was not told and she cried, striking her staff against the earthen floor, “Why have you said no word to me, who have sat all these years panting and pining and thirsting for such news? Two moons--was ever so cold a soul as you and would not any other woman have told the thing the first day that she knew it!” Then the young woman stayed her knife and she said in her careful way, “I did not lest I might be wrong and grieve you worse than if I never gave you hope.” But this the mother would not grant and she spat and said, “Well and with all the children I have had could not I have told you whether you were right or wrong? No, you think I am a child and foolish with my age. I know what you think--yes, you show it with every step you make.” But the young woman answered nothing. She pressed her lips together, those full pale lips, and poured a bowl of tea from an earthen pot that stood there on the table and she led the mother to her usual place against the wall.