And then she grew uneasy and full of gloom and thought to herself that if the child were joy yet was it a new gate for sorrow to enter by, too, and so is every child, and when she thought of this and how the child might be born dead or shapen wrong or dull or blind or a girl or any of these things, she hated gods and goddesses who have such powers to mar a mortal, and she muttered, “Have I not been more than punished for any little sin I did? Who could have thought the gods would know what I did that day? But doubtless that old god in the shrine smelled the sin about him and told the goddess somehow even though I covered up his eyes. Well, I will stay away from gods, so sinful an old soul as I be, for even if I would I do not know how to atone more for what I did than I have atoned. I swear if they measured up the joy and sorrow I have had in my whole life the sorrow would sink the scales like stone, and the joy be nothing more than thistledown, such poor joys as I have had. I did not bear the child and I have seen my blind maid die, still blind. Does not sorrow atone? Aye, I have been very full of sorrows all my life long, always poor too, with all my sorrows. But gods know no justice.” So, she thought gloomily, she had two sorrows to bear now: fear lest her grandson be not whole and sound or else a girl, and waiting for this younger son who would not come. Sometimes she thought her whole life was only made of waiting now. So had she waited for her man to come who never came, and now her son and grandsons. Such was her life and poor stuff it was, she thought. Yet she must hope and whenever anyone went into town she always asked him when he came back again, “Saw you my little son today anywhere?” And she would go about the hamlet and to this house and that and say, “Who went to town today?” And when one said he had, she asked again, “Saw you my little son today, goodman?” All through the hamlet in those days of waiting the men and women grew used to this question and when they looked up and saw her leaning on the staff her son had cut for her from a branch of their own trees and heard her old quavering voice ask, “Neighbor, saw you my little son today?” they would answer kindly enough, “No, no, good mother, and how could we see him in the common market-place where we go and he such as he is, and one you say who lives by books?” Then she would turn away dashed of her hope again and she let her voice sink and mutter, “I do not know--well and I think it is he has to do with books somewhere,” and they would laugh and say to humor her, “If some day we pass a place where books are sold we will look in and see if he is there behind the counter.” So she must go home to wait and wonder if the moths had eaten up the sheepskins. * * * * *