But who can tell what a young man’s heart will be? Instead of smiling silence, half pleased and half ashamed, he stopped and turned and said to her most wilfully, “I have been waiting for you to say some such thing--it is all that mothers’ heads run upon, I do believe! My comrades tell me it is the chiefest thing their parents say--wed--wed--wed! Well then, mother, I will not wed! And if you wed me against my will, then shall you never see my face again! I never will come home again!” He turned and went on more quickly and she dared not say a word, but only sat amazed and frightened at his anger and that he did not sing again. Yet she forgot all this now in what was to come. The path along which they had come since early dawn grew narrower and more narrow toward noon, and those hills which around their own valleys were so gently shaped, so mild in their round curves against the sky and so green with grass and bamboo, rose now as they went among them into sharper, bolder lines. At last when noon was full and the sun poured its heat down straight the gentle hills were gone, and in their place rose a range of mountains bare and rocky and cruelly pointed against the sky. They seemed the sharper too because the sky that day was so cloudless, bright and hard and blue, above the sand color of the bare mountains. Beneath great pale cliffs the path wound, the stones not black and dark, but pale as light in hue and very strange, and nothing grew there, for there was no water anywhere. So the path wound up and yet more up and when noon was passed an hour or two, they came suddenly into a round deep valley in the mountain tops, and there some water was, for there was a small square village enclosed about with a rocky wall, and about it the green of a few fields. But when the mother and her son stopped at the gate to that village and asked of the place they sought, one who stood there pointed yet higher to a ridge and said, “There where the green ends on that lower edge there are the two houses. It is the last edge of green, and above it there are only rocks and sky.” Now all this time the mother had stared astonished at these mountains and at their strange wild shapes and paleness, and at the scanty green. She had spent her life in the midst of valleys, and now as the path wound up from the enclosed village she stared about aghast to see how mortally poor the land was here and how shallow on the pale rocks the soil was and how scanty all the crops, even now when harvest drew on, and she cried out to the youth, “I do not like the looks of this place, son! I doubt it is too hard a place for your sister. Well, we will take her home, then. Yes, if it is too hard for her here I can walk and we will put her on the ass, and let them say what they will. They paid nothing for her, and I will ask nothing but her back again.”