Now the mother was no longer young. She was in her forty and third year, and when she counted on her fingers sometimes in the night how many years her children’s father had been gone, she used the fingers of her two hands and two more over again, and even the years that she had let the hamlet think him dead were more than all the fingers on one hand. Yet she walked straight and slight as ever, and no flesh grew on her frame. Others might begin to shrivel or grow fat as the cousin’s wife did each year, and the old gossip, too, yet this woman stayed lean and strong as she had been when she was young. But her breasts grew small and dry, and in the strong sunlight where one saw her face full, there were lines about the eyes from working in the bright hard sunshine, and the skin was dark with the burning of the many years in the fields. She moved somewhat more slowly than she did, too, without the old lightness, for she had never been as she was before she tore that wild life out of her. When she was called for childbirth in the hamlet as she often was now, seeing she was widowed and counted as among the ones not young, she found it hard to move so quickly as she must sometimes, and once or twice a young mother caught the child herself, and once she even let a newborn babe fall to the brick floor and bruise its head, and it was a boy, too, but still no harm was done in the end most luckily, for the lad grew up sturdy and with all his senses in him. As her children grew, to them their mother seemed old. The eldest was forever urging her to rest herself and not to heave so at the hard great clods when the land was ploughed but let him do it, for he did it easily now in the strength of his young manhood, and he strove to have her do the lesser lighter things, and nothing pleased him better than to see her sit quietly upon her stool in the shade on a summer’s day sewing, and let him go to the land alone. Yet the truth was she was not after all as old as her son would have her. She ever loved the field work better than any and she loved to work there on the land and then come home, her body wet with her clean sweat and the wind blowing cool on that wetness, and her flesh weary but sweetly so. Her eyes were used to fields and hills and great things, and they did not narrow easily to small fine things like needles. Indeed, in that house they sorely missed a woman young and with sound eyes, for they all knew now the girl’s eyes were blind. She knew, too, poor maid; ever since that day when she had gone to town with her mother she knew it secretly, even as her mother did, and neither had any great faith in the goddess, somehow, the mother from what she feared of that old sin of hers, and the maid because her blindness seemed to her a destiny.