Then she knew the silly younger lad had boasted of what he would have and she stood speechless, caught in her fault, staring at her son and silent, and he went on and cried, his bitterness bursting from him, “Yes, you keep the money, and I give you all we earn. I never take a penny for my own, not even to smoke a little pipe of any kind or take a bowl of wine or buy myself anything a young man might have and count it but his due. Yet you must promise him all I never had! And for what? To do the labor that he ought to do for nothing and to pay for what he eats and wears!” “I did not promise rings and robes,” she said in a low and troubled voice, half afraid of this angry son of hers who was so grave and quiet on other days that she did not know him now. “You did!” he said most passionately. “Or if not that, then worse, for he said he was to have what he wanted when the harvest money was in and taxes paid. He said you promised!” “I meant some small toy or other, costing but a penny or so,” she answered, shamed before this good son of hers. And then plucking up her courage--for was he not her son still?--she added, “And if I did promise a little toy it was but to save him from your angers on him always, whatever he may do, so that you keep him down with all your cruel looks and words--and now blows!” But he would say no more. He fell to the sheaves again and worked as though some demon had him, he worked so hard and fast. The mother stood looking at him, not knowing what to do, feeling he was hard, too, with her little son, and yet knowing somehow she was wrong. Then as she looked she saw the young man was very near to tears, so that he set his jaws hard to keep back a sob, and when she saw this sign of feeling in him, such as she had never seen in him who always seemed so usual and content and without any desire, her heart grew soft as ever it did when she had harmed a child of hers, although he did not know it, and she softened to him more than she had ever done before and she cried quickly, “Son, I am wrong, I know. I have not done well enough for you of late. I have not seen how you have grown into a man. But man you are, and now I see it, and you shall take the man’s place in our house and you shall have the money and the chief place in name as well as in the labor you have always done. Yes, I see you are a man now, and I will do straightway what I have put off too long. I will find a wife for you and it will be your turn now and hers. I have not seen it, but now I see it well.” So she made amends. He muttered something then that she could not hear and turned his back and said no more but worked on. But she felt eased by her amends and went back crying briskly, “Well, and all the rice will be burned, I swear--” and this she said to cover up the feeling of the moment and make it usual.