The mother went then and dipped rice with a gourd from the basket where they kept it stored, and she leveled the gourd with her other hand so not a grain was spilled, and she poured the rice into a basket made of finely split bamboo and went along the path to the pond’s edge, and as she went she looked down the street. But she saw no glimpse of new blue. She stepped carefully down the bank and began to wash the rice, dipping the basket into the water and scrubbing the grain with her brown strong hands, dipping it again and again until the rice shone clean and white as wet pearls. On her way back she stooped to pull a head of cabbage where it grew, and threw a handful of grass to the water buffalo tethered under a tree, and so she came again to the house. Now the elder boy came home from the street leading his sister by the hand, and the mother asked him quietly, “Saw you your father on the street or in the inn or at anyone’s door?” “He sat a while at the inn drinking tea this morning,” the boy replied, wondering. “And I saw his robe, new and blue, and it was pretty and our cousin when he knew how much it cost said it had cost my father very dear.” “Aye, it cost him dear, I swear!” said the mother, suddenly, her voice hard. And the girl piped up, echoing her brother, “Yes, his robe was blue--even I could see that it was blue.” But the mother said no more. The babe began to weep where he lay sleeping in a winnowing basket and she went and picked him up and opened her coat and held him to her breast, and she suckled him as she went to cook the meal. But first she called to the old woman, “Turn yourself where you sit, old mother, and watch and tell me if you see the new blue of his robe, and I will put the meal on the table.” “I will, then, daughter,” called the old dame cheerfully. Yet when the rice was cooked and flaked, white and dry as the man loved it, still he did not come. When the cabbage was tender and the woman had even made a bit of sweet and sour sauce to pour upon its heart, as he loved it, he did not come. They waited a while and the old woman grew hungry and faint with the smell of the food in her nostrils and she cried out, in a sudden small anger, being so hungry, “Wait no more for that son of mine! The water is leaking out of my mouth and my belly is as empty as a drum and still he is not here!”