“Aye,” said the mother quietly, “I remembered every word.” And she went alone into the house and stood behind the door and wept silently, and the letter and even the bit of paper that was the same as silver were but ashes for all her pride. They were worthless for her when she was alone; there was no meaning in them then. Nevertheless, the mother’s plot worked well enough and hereafter in the hamlet there was none who mocked at her or hinted she was a woman whose man had left her. Rather did she need to harden her heart toward them now, because since it was known she had the paper money and that there would come more next year like it, some came to borrow of her secretly, the old letter writer one, and besides him an idle man or two who sent his wife to ask for him, and the woman was hard put to it to refuse since all in the hamlet were some sort of kin and all surnamed Li, but she said this and that, and that she owed the money for a debt and that she had spent it already or some such thing. And some cried out at her when they talked together idly in a dooryard, and the gossip said before her meaningfully how much a bit of cloth cost these days and even a needle or two was costly and a few strands of silken thread to make a flower on a shoe for color, and they all took care to cry if she were there, “Well is it for such as you, and a very lucky destiny, that you have no need to think thrice over a penny, while your man is out earning silver and sending it to you and you have it over and above what is wrest from the bitter land!” And sometimes a man would call, “I doubt it is a good thing to have so rich a woman in our hamlet lest the robbers come. Aye, robbers come where riches are, as flies to any honey!” It seemed to her at last that daily this bit of paper grew more troublesome, not only because of what the gossip said, and because this one and that one among the men would ask to see it close, but because she too was not used to money being of paper and she grew to hate the thing because she was ever afraid the wind might blow it away or the rats gnaw it or the children find it and think it nothing and tear it in play, and every day she must look to see if it were safe in the basket of stored rice where she kept it hid, because she was afraid it would mold in the earthen wall and rot away there. At last the thing grew such a burden on her that one day when she saw the cousin start for the town she ran to him and whispered, “Change me this bit of paper into hard silver, I pray, so that I can feel it in my hand, because this bit of paper seems nothing when I hold it.”