Only this youngest son was sound and whole and merry and oftentimes he seemed his father over again, and more and more the mother loved him, and all the love she ever had for the man now turned itself upon this son. She loved him and often stood between him and the elder brother so that when the young man seized the boy she rushed between them and caught the blows and forced her son to cease for shame because he might strike his mother, and then the lad would slip away. It came to be that after a while the lad slipped often thus away and from his hiding in his cousin’s house he went to wandering here and there and even to the town and he would be gone perhaps a day or two, and then he would run back to his cousin’s house and come out as if he had been there all the time, his eyes upon his elder brother’s mood that day. And if he did not come, the mother would wait until the elder son was gone and she went to the cousin’s house and coaxed him home with some dainty she had made. But she half feared her elder son too these days and sometimes she would start with him to the field or leave soon and come and give the lad his meal first before his brother came, and he picked the best from every dish and she let him, for she loved him so well. She loved him for his merry words and ways and for his smooth round face and for the same supple, lissome body that his father had. The elder lad went bent already with his labor, his hand hard and slow, but this lad was quick and brown and smooth-skinned everywhere and light upon his feet as a young male cat, and the mother loved him. And the slow elder son felt this warm love his mother had for his brother, and he brooded on it. Every day of labor he had done, and all the labor that he spared her he remembered now and it seemed to him his mother was the crudest soul that ever lived and she never recked it anything that he had striven from childhood for her sake. So the bitterness gathered slow and deep within his heart, and he hated his brother. XIV Now all this hatred gathered in the elder son and even the mother did not know how deep it was until a certain day when out it came, bursting forth like a river dammed behind a dyke and swollen with waters from small secret sources that men do not know, so that when it breaks they are astonished because none knew how it had been with that river all the days when it had seemed the same.