Sometimes when the man came home from a holiday in town or when he had gone on a rainy day to the little inn and gambled a while with the idlers there, when he came home again to this small house, to this woman bearing her children that he must labor to feed, it fell upon him like a terror that so long as he lived there was naught for him but this, to rise in the morning and go to this land of which they owned but little and rented from a landlord who lived in pleasure in some far city; to spend his day upon that rented land even as his father had done before him; to come home to eat his same coarse food and never the best the land could give, for the best must ever be sold for others to eat; to sleep, to rise again to the same next day. Even the harvests were not his own, for he must measure out a share to that landlord and he must take another share and fee the townsman who was the landlord’s agent. When he thought of this agent he could not bear it, for this townsman was such a one as he himself would fain have been, dressed in soft silk and his skin pale and fair and with that smooth oily look that townsmen have who work at some small, light task and are well fed. On such days when all these thoughts pressed on him he was very surly and he spoke not at all to the woman except to curse her for some slowness, and when her quick temper rose against him it was a strange malicious pleasure to him to fall to loud quarreling with her, and it eased him somehow, although she had often the best of him, too, because her temper was more stout than his, except when she was angry at a child. Even to his anger he could not cling as long as she did, but grew weary of it and flung himself off to something else. Quickest of all would her anger rise if he struck one of the children or shouted at one if it cried. Then she could not bear it, and she flew against him if it were to save a child and ever the child was right and he was wrong, and this angered him more than anything, that she put the children before him, or he thought she did. Yes, on days like this he held as nothing even the good few holidays he took, the feast days and the long idle winter days when he did nothing but sleep, and when he could not sleep he gambled. A lucky gambler he was, too, and he always came home with more than he took, and it seemed an easy way to live, if he were a lone man and had but himself to feed. He loved the chance of gambling and the excitement and the merriment of the game and all the men crowded together to see what lucky play he made. Truly luck was in his nimble fingers, which even the plough and the hoe had not made stiff, for he was young yet, only twenty and eight years of age, and he had never worked more than he must.