And the mother sat and looked at those hills around and saw how the summer came on to its full height and every hillside was green and all the grain high in the fields, and she forced her body that was weary always now even though she was idle all the livelong day, and she thought, “I must go and see my maid and I will go at once, seeing I am not needed on the land and here I sit idle. I will go and before the great heat comes, lest my flux drop on me again unaware. Yes--I will go this very tomorrow since there is no sign of cloud in this fair sky--this blue sky--” she looked up at the sky and saw how blue it was and remembered suddenly as she did nowadays some bit of her life long gone, and she remembered the blue robe her man had bought once and that he wore away and she sighed and thought with some dim old pang, “On such a day as this he bought the robe and we quarreled--on just such a fair day, for I remember the robe was the color of the sky that day.” She sighed and rose to drive the thought away and when her elder son came she said restlessly, “I think to go and see your sister tomorrow, and how she does in the house where she was wed, seeing she cannot come to me.” Then the son said, anxiously, “Mother, I cannot go with you now, for there is work to do tomorrow. Wait until the harvest is over and the grain threshed and measured, and I have a little free time.” But suddenly the mother could not wait. There was strength in her a plenty yet when she had something she set her mind to do, and she was weary of her idleness and sitting and she said, “No, I will go tomorrow!” And the son said, worried still and he was always easily worried if aught came that was sudden and out of the common and he could not think what to do quickly, “But how will you go, mother?” She said, “Why, I will ride my cousin’s ass if he will lend it, and do you bid a lad of his to go and call your brother to walk beside and lead the ass, and we will go safe enough, the two of us, for there are no robbers near these days that I have heard tell of, except that new kind in the town they call the communists, who do not harm the poor, they say--” At last the son was willing, though not too easily and not until his wife said quietly, “It is true I cannot see any great danger if the younger one goes with her.” So they let the mother have her way at last, and the cousin’s lad was sent to town to search until he found the younger son and so he did and came back wide-eyed and said, “My cousin and your second son will come, aunt.” And then he thought a while and twisted the button on his coat and said again, “I swear it is a strange and secret place where he lives and a hard place to find. He lives in a long room full of beds, some twenty beds or so above a shop, and the room is filled with books and papers. But he does not work in the shop for I asked him. I did not know my cousin could read, aunt. If he reads those books he must be very learned.”