Once more she went into the town then on this old task, and she went and sought a new letter writer this time, whom she had never seen before, and she sighed and said, “Write to my brother’s wife and say her husband is dead. And how did he die? He was caught in a burning house, for the house where he lived caught on fire from a lamp turned over by some slave, and there he burned up in his sleep and even his ashes are lost so there is no body to send home.” And the letter writer wrote her own name for the sister’s name and she gave a false name as of some stranger who wrote to tell the news and for a little more he wrote the name of some other town than this, and he scented something strange here, but he let it pass, too, since it was none of his affair and he had silver here to pay for silence. So was the woman saved. But she could not wait to finish her salvation. No, she must let the landlord’s agent know somehow, and she went here and there and asked where the landlord’s old home was, where he did not live now but where the agent doubtless was well known. And she grew heedless in her anxiety to be saved, and she ran there and it seemed the gods were with her on that day and aided her, for there he came alone and she met him at the gate of the house and as he was ready to turn in to it. Then she cried out and laid her hand upon his arm, and he looked down at her and at her hand upon his arm and he said, “What is it, woman?” And she whispered, “Sir, I am widowed--I have but heard this day I am widowed!” And he shook her hand off and he said loudly, “What is that to me!” And when she looked at him painfully he said roughly, “I paid you--I paid you very well!” And suddenly someone he knew called out from the street and laughed and said, “How now, good fellow? And a very pretty, lusty goodwife, too, to lay hold on a man thus!” But the man called back, scarcely lifting those heavy lids of his, and he said coldly, “Aye--if you like them coarse and brown, but I do not!” And he went on his way. She stood there then astonished and ashamed and understanding nothing. But how had she been paid? What had he ever given her? And suddenly she remembered the trinkets he had given her. That was her pay! Yes, by those small worthless trinkets he held himself free of all that he had done. * * * * * What could she do, then, knowing all? She set her feet steadfastly upon the road to home, her heart deathly still within her, and she said over and over, “It is not time to weep yet--the hour is not come yet when I may weep.” And she would not let her weeping come. No, the weeping gathered in her great and tremulous but she would not weep. She held her heart hard and silent for a day or two, until the news came, the letter she had written, and she took it to the reader in the hamlet, and she said steadily as she gave it to him, “I fear there is ill news in it, uncle--it is come out of time.”