But the mother called back loudly and courteously, “No--no--it is only that my children grow hungry betimes!” “Truly a very able, forward woman!” cried the cousin’s wife again and went within once more, carrying the grass she had come to fetch. The mother sat on a while in the evening twilight, her face half smiling. It was true she could rightly be proud, proud of her own strength, proud of her children, proud of that man of hers. But even so there could not be peace for long. The boy thrust his bowl suddenly before her, “M-ma, more!” She rose then to fill it for him again, and when she came out of the door the sun rested in a dip between the hills, on the edge of the very field where she had worked that day long. It rested there, caught seemingly for an instant between the hills, and hung motionless, huge and solidly gold, and then it went slipping slowly out of sight. Out of the immediate dusk she saw the man coming along a footpath, his hoe over his shoulder and caught under his raised arm as he came buttoning his coat. He walked light and lithe as a young male cat, and suddenly he broke into singing. He loved to sing, his voice high and quivering and clear, and many a song he knew, so that oftentimes upon a holiday he was asked to sing for all in the teashop and so pass the time away. He lowered his voice as he came to the house, and when at last he reached the threshold he was only singing a very little but still in that high, shaking, thrilling voice, his words set into some swift rhythm. He put his hoe against the wall, and the old woman, hearing him, woke out of a doze that had fallen on her after she had eaten and she began to speak as though she had not left off, “As I said, my son likes a little pease mixed in his rice and such a full sweet taste--” The man laughed an easy idle laugh and went into the house, and out of the door his pleasant voice came, “Aye, old mother, and so I do!” Outside the door the girl child, her bowl emptied, sat passive and filled and now that the sun was gone she opened her eyes a little and looked about her more easily and without complaining. The mother went into the kitchen again and brought out a steaming bowl of rice for the man. It was a large bowl of coarse blue and white pottery, and it was filled to the brim. Into it the mother had dropped an egg she had saved from the few fowls they kept and now the fresh white of the egg began to harden. When the man worked hard he must have a bit of meat or an egg. However they might quarrel, it was a pleasure to her to see him fed well, and all their quarreling, she thought to herself, was only of the lips. Well she loved to see him eat, even if sometimes she belabored him with her tongue for something. She called now to the old woman, “I have put a new-laid egg into your son’s rice! And he has cabbage, too.”