But the mother was not cool yet. She picked up the ring from the dust where he had thrown it and put it between her teeth and bit on it, lest by any chance it might be the gold he said it was and a good bargain they could sell again for something. It was true that sometimes stolen things were cheaply sold, but scarcely, she thought, so cheaply as he said this was, although he might have lied, perhaps, in fear of her. But when she bit on it the thing would not give at all between her hard white teeth as it must if the gold were pure, and she cried out in new anger, “And if it were gold would it not be soft between my teeth? It is brass and hard--” she gnawed at it a while and spat the yellow shallow gold from out her mouth--“See, it has scarce been dipped even in the gold!” She could not bear it then that the man had been so childishly deceived, and she went out from him to work upon the land, her heart hard so that she would not see the sobbing children nor would she hear the old mother’s quavering anxious voice that said, “When I was young I let my man be pleased--a wife should let her man be pleased with a little slight thing....” No, she would not hear anything to cool her anger down. But after she had worked a while on the land the gentle autumn wind blew into her angry heart and cooled it without her knowing it. Drifting leaves and brown hillsides from which the green of summer had died away, the gray sky and the far cry of wild geese flying southward, the quiescent land and all the quiet melancholy of the falling year stole into her heart without her knowledge and made her kind again. And while her hand scattered the winter wheat into the soft and well-tilled soil, in her heart came quiet and she remembered that she loved the man well and his laughing face came before her and stirred her and she said to herself remorsefully, “I will make him a dainty dish for his meal this noon. It may be I was too angry for but a little money spent, after all.” She was in great haste and longing to be gone then and at home to make the dish and show him she was changed, but when she was come there he still lay angry in the bed and he lay with his face inward and would not say a word. When she had made the dish and had caught some shrimps from the pond to mix into it as he liked and when she called him he would not rise and he would not eat at all. He said very faintly as though he were ill, “I cannot eat indeed--you have cursed the souls out of me.”