At last the young man wept too, not so much for his sister nor even for his mother, but because he was so footsore and so worn and his world awry. Thus they came at last to their own door and when she was down from the ass the mother called her elder son piercingly and so sharply that he came running out and she cried, “Son, your sister is dead!” And while he stared at her scarcely comprehending, she poured out the tale, and at the sound of her voice others came quickly to hear the tale until there in the dusk of night nearly all the hamlet stood to hear it. The younger son stood there half fainting, leaning on the ass, and when his mother talked on he went and threw himself upon the ground and lay there dazed with what had come about this day, and he lay silent while his mother wept and cried aloud and in her weeping said, looking with her streaming eyes to this face and to that, “There my little maid was, dead and gone, and I hate myself I ever let her go, and I would not have let her go if it had not been for this cold-hearted son’s wife of mine who begrudged the little maid a bit of meat and a little flower on her shoe and so I was fearful if I died and the maid was afraid, too--a little tender child who never would have left me of her own will! What cared she for man or marriage and a child’s heart in her always, clinging to her home and me? Oh, son, it is your wife who has brought this on me--I curse the day she came and no wonder she is childless with so hard a heart!” So on and on the mother cried and at first they all listened in silence or exclaiming something when they had pieced the tale from what she said between her weeping, and then they tried to comfort her, but she would not let herself be comforted. The eldest son said nothing but stood with downcast head until she cursed his wife and spoke against her child-bearing, and then he said in a reasonable and quiet voice, “No, mother, she did not bid you send my sister to that place. You sent her so quickly and did not say a word to anyone but fixed it so and we wondered even that you did not go and see how it was there for yourself,” and he turned to his father’s cousin and he said, “Did you not think so, cousin? Do you remember how I said we were surprised my mother was so quick in the matter?” And the cousin turned his eyes away and muttered unwillingly, chewing a bit of straw, “Oh, aye, a little quick,” and his wife who stood holding a grandchild in her arms said mournfully to the mother, “Yes, it is true, sister, you be a very quick woman always, and never asking anyone if this or that is well to be done. No, before any of us know it or guess what it is you are about you have done all and it is finished, and you only want us to say you have done well. It is your nature all your life to be like this.”