She said no more then but set the bowl aside and went silent to her work again, her lips pressed hard together, nor would she aid the old mother when she besought her son to eat. But the mother could not beg him for she remembered freshly all her anger. And as she went the dog came up to her begging and hungry, and she went into the kitchen again and there the dish was she had made for the man. She put out her hand and muttered, “Well, then, I will even give it to the dog.” But she could not do it. After all, it was food for men and not to be so wasted and she set the dish back in the niche of the wall and found a little stale cold rice and gave it to the dog. And she said to her heart that she was angry still. Yet in the night when she laid herself beside him and the children curled against her in the darkness and she felt the man on her other side, her anger was clean gone. Then it seemed to her this man was but a child, too, and dependent on her as all in this house were, and when the morning came she rose, very gentle and quiet, and after all were fed except him, she went to him and coaxed him to rise and eat, and when he saw her like this he rose slowly as though from a sick bed and he ate a little of the dish she had made and then he finished it, for it was one he loved. And while he ate the old woman watched him lovingly, clacking as she watched, of this and that. But he would not work that day. No, as the mother went out to the field he sat upon a stool in the sun of the doorway and he shook his head feebly and he said, “I feel a very weak place in me and a pain that flutters at the mouth of my heart and I will rest myself this day.” And the mother felt that she had been wrong to blame him so heartily that he was like this and so she said, soothing him and sorry for her anger, “Rest yourself, then,” and went her way. But when she was gone the man grew restless and he was weary of his mother’s constant chatter, for the old woman grew very merry to think her son would be at home all day to talk to, though for the man it was a dull thing to sit and listen to her and see the children playing. He rose then, muttering he would be better if he had some hot tea in him, and he went down the little street to the wayside inn his fifth cousin kept. At the inn there were other men drinking tea, too, and talking, and tables were set under a canopy of cloth upon the street, where travelers might pass, and when such travelers stayed one heard a tale or two of this strange thing and that, and even perhaps some story-teller passed and told his tales, and indeed the inn was a merry, noisy place. But as he went the man met his sober cousin coming from the field for his first morning meal, having already worked a space since dawn, and this cousin called, “Where do you go and not at work?”