er dark
eyes, which the wine seemed to have cleared and boldened, swept me up
and down, taking me in, making sure perhaps whether or no she had ever
seen me, and what sort of a brute I might be. Then she said: "I was born
here. Are you from these parts?" I shook my head--"No, from the other
side of the county."

She laughed. Then, after a moment's silence, said abruptly:

"I been to a weddin'--first I've seen since I was a girl."

Some instinct kept me silent.

"My own daughter's weddin', but nobody didn't know me--not likely."

I had dropped down under the shelter of the wall on to a stone opposite,
and at those words looked at her with interest indeed. She--this
coarsened, wasted, suspiciously scented woman of the town--the mother of
that sweet, sunny child I had just seen married. And again instinctively
silent about my own presence at the wedding, I murmured:

"I thought I saw some confetti in that farmyard as I came up the lane."

She laughed again.

"Confetti--that's the little pink and white and blue things--plenty o'
that," and she added fiercely: "My own brother didn' know me--let alone
my girl. How should she?--I haven't seen her since she was a baby--she
was a laughin' little thing," and she gazed past me with that look in
the eyes as of people who are staring back into the bygone. "I guess we
was laughin' when we got her. 'Twas just here--summer-time. I 'ad the
moon in my blood that night, right enough." Then, turning her eyes on my
face, she added: "That's what a girl _will_ 'ave, you know, once in a
while, and like as not it'll du for her. Only thirty-five now, I am, an'
pretty nigh the end o' my tether. What can you expect?--I'm a gay woman.
Did for me right enough. Her father's dead, tu."

"Do you mean," I said, "because of your child?"

She nodded. "I suppose you can say that. They made me bring an order
against him. He wouldn't pay up, so he went and enlisted, an' in tu
years 'e was dead in the Boer War--so it killed him right enough. But
there she is, a sweet sprig if ever there was one. That's a strange
thing, isn't it?" And she stared straight before her in a sudden
silence. Nor could _I_ find anything to say, slowly taking in the
strangeness of this thing. That girl, so like a sunbeam, of whom the
people talked as though she were a blessing in their lives--her coming
into life to have been the ruin of the two who gave her being!

The woman went on dully: "Funny how I knew she was goin'