The Weaver's Wife

A traveling holy man, seeking shelter for the night, was welcomed by a weaver who sent him home with his wife while he went to fetch wine and food for the guest's comfort. The wife, secretly involved with another man, saw her husband's absence as an opportunity and left the guest waiting so she could meet her lover.

On her way out, she crossed paths with her drunk and stumbling husband returning home, and fled back inside just in time to avoid being seen, quickly changing out of her finery. Her husband, already suspicious from village gossip and now noticing her flustered state, beat her and tied her to a post before falling into a drunken sleep.

A friend, the barber's wife, arrived to relay a message from the waiting lover. Learning the weaver's wife was bound and could not go, the friend offered to take her place at the post so the wife could sneak out and keep her rendezvous, on the condition she return promptly.

When the drunk husband woke briefly and, in his confusion, cut off what he believed was his nagging wife's nose with a knife before falling back asleep, it was in fact the loyal friend who suffered the injury in her place -- a devastating price paid for a favor.

When the actual wife returned and freed her friend, hearing what had happened, she took her position back at the post and, using a bold and elaborate invocation of the gods to publicly 'prove' her faithfulness through a supposed miracle, managed to convince her husband her nose had been restored by her own virtue -- persuading him entirely, though the guest who witnessed the whole sequence understood every deceptive layer of what had actually occurred.