Author: Edith Wharton

I



The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy
corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles
and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night
was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms
looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on
it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow
light far across the endless undulations.

Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street,
past the bank and Michael Eady's new brick store and Lawyer Varnum's
house with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the
Varnum gate, where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the
church reared its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the
young man walked toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade
along the side wall of the building, but from the lower openings, on
the side where the ground sloped steeply down to the Corbury road,
the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in the
track leading to the basement door, and showing, under an adjoining
shed, a line of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it
gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was
rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less
tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet
and the metallic dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted
receiver," he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a
year's course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled
in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the
images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected
moments, through the totally different associations of thought in
which he had since been living. His father's death, and the
misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's
studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much
practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge
cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings
glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by
his sharp tramp. At the end of the village he paused before the
darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing
quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not another
figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's
spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on
clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts of
the coasters; but to-night not a sled darkened the whiteness of the
long declivity. The hush of midnight lay on the village, and all its
waking life was gathered behind the church windows, from which
strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands of yellow light.

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the
slope toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the
revealing rays from within he made a circuit through the untrodden
snow and gradually approached the farther angle of the basement
wall. Thence, still hugging the shadow, he edged his way cautiously
forward to the nearest window, holding back his straight spare body
and craning his neck till he got a glimpse of the room.

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it
seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the
gas-jets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls,
and the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as
though they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged
with girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood
a row of kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen.
By this time the music had stopped, and the musicians-a fiddler, and
the young lady who played the harmonium on Sundays-were hastily
refreshing themselves at one corner of the supper-table which
aligned its devastated pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the
platform at the end of the hall. The guests were preparing to leave,
and the tide had already set toward the passage where coats and
wraps were hung, when a young man with a sprightly foot and a shock
of black hair shot into the middle of the floor and clapped his
hands. The signal took instant effect. The musicians hurried to
their instruments, the dancers-some already half-muffled for
departure-fell into line down each side of the room, the older
spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young man,
after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl
who had already wound a cherry-coloured "fascinator" about her head,
and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its
length to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.

Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse
of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed him
that another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of
the reel, who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced
well, and his partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line,
her light figure swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing
swiftness, the scarf flew off her head and stood out behind her
shoulders, and Frome, at each turn, caught sight of her laughing
panting lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the
dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points in a maze of flying
lines.

The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep
up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing
their mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at
the window that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his
eyes from the girl's face to that of her partner, which, in the
exhilaration of the dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent
ownership. Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious
Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield
its first notion of "smart" business methods, and whose new brick
store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely
to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to
the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had
been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively
invited a horse-whipping. It was strange that the girl did not seem
aware of it: that she could lift her rapt face to her dancer's, and
drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the offence of
his look and touch.

Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his
wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare evenings when some chance
of amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had
suggested, when the girl came to live with them, that such
opportunities should be put in her way. Mattie Silver came from
Stamford, and when she entered the Fromes' household to act as her
cousin Zeena's aid it was thought best, as she came without pay, not
to let her feel too sharp a contrast between the life she had left
and the isolation of a Starkfield farm. But for this-as Frome
sardonically reflected-it would hardly have occurred to Zeena to
take any thought for the girl's amusement.

When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an
occasional evening out he had inwardly demurred at having to do the
extra two miles to the village and back after his hard day on the
farm; but not long afterward he had reached the point of wishing
that Starkfield might give all its nights to revelry.

Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early
morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing
her; but no moments in her company were comparable to those when,
her arm in his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long
stride, they walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken
to the girl from the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats
to meet her, and she had smiled and waved to him from the train,
crying out, "You must be Ethan!" as she jumped down with her
bundles, while he reflected, looking over her slight person: "She
don't look much on housework, but she ain't a fretter, anyhow." But
it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful
young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. The
girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought
her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her
things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all
he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at
will.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most
intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more
sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty.
His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even
in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and
powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as
a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He
did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did,
or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then
he learned that one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of
wonder: that at his side, living under his roof and eating his
bread, was a creature to whom he could say: "That's Orion down
yonder; the big fellow to the right is Aldebaran, and the bunch of
little ones-like bees swarming-they're the Pleiades..." or whom he
could hold entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through
the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice age, and the
long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that admiration for
his learning mingled with Mattie's wonder at what he taught was not
the least part of his pleasure. And there were other sensations,
less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together with a
shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the
flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the
intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to
him once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan
that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had
at last been found to utter his secret soul....

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came
back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl
down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have
thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay
but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference.
The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw
him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even
noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought
she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was
amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick
of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent
fears. His wife had never shown any jealousy of Mattie, but of late
she had grumbled increasingly over the house-work and found oblique
ways of attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena had
always been what Starkfield called "sickly," and Frome had to admit
that, if she were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of
a stronger arm than the one which lay so lightly in his during the
night walks to the farm. Mattie had no natural turn for
housekeeping, and her training had done nothing to remedy the
defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful and dreamy, and not
disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had an idea that if she
were to marry a man she was fond of the dormant instinct would wake,
and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the county; but
domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first she was
so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she laughed
with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to
supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to
light the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and
neglecting the mill for the farm that he might help her about the
house during the day. He even crept down on Saturday nights to scrub
the kitchen floor after the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one
day, had surprised him at the churn and had turned away silently,
with one of her queer looks.

Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible
but more disquieting. One cold winter morning, as he dressed in the
dark, his candle flickering in the draught of the ill-fitting
window, he had heard her speak from the bed behind him.

"The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for
me," she said in her flat whine.

He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had
startled him, though she was given to abrupt explosions of speech
after long intervals of secretive silence.

He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined
under the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish
tinge from the whiteness of the pillow.

"Nobody to do for you?" he repeated.

"If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes."

Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch
the reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-glass
above the wash-stand.

"Why on earth should Mattie go?"

"Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from
behind him.

"Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her," he returned,
scraping hard at his chin.

"I wouldn't ever have it said that I stood in the way of a poor girl
like Mattie marrying a smart fellow like Denis Eady," Zeena answered
in a tone of plaintive self-effacement.

Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw
the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude
was an excuse for not making an immediate reply.

"And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody," Zeena
continued. "He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he's heard
about, that might come-"

Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.

"Denis Eady! If that's all, I guess there's no such hurry to look
round for a girl."

"Well, I'd like to talk to you about it," said Zeena obstinately.

He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste. "All right. But I
haven't got the time now; I'm late as it is," he returned, holding
his old silver turnip-watch to the candle.

Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching him in
silence while he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and jerked
his arms into his coat; but as he went toward the door she said,
suddenly and incisively: "I guess you're always late, now you shave
every morning."

That thrust had frightened him more than any vague insinuations
about Denis Eady. It was a fact that since Mattie Silver's coming he
had taken to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to be
asleep when he left her side in the winter darkness, and he had
stupidly assumed that she would not notice any change in his
appearance. Once or twice in the past he had been faintly disquieted
by Zenobia's way of letting things happen without seeming to remark
them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that
she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences. Of late,
however, there had been no room in his thoughts for such vague
apprehensions. Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded
into an insubstantial shade. All his life was lived in the sight and
sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of its being
otherwise. But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw Mattie
spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of disregarded
hints and menaces wove their cloud about his brain....






II





As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the
projecting storm-door, watched the segregation of the grotesquely
muffled groups, in which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a
face flushed with food and dancing. The villagers, being afoot, were
the first to climb the slope to the main street, while the country
neighbours packed themselves more slowly into the sleighs under the
shed.

"Ain't you riding, Mattie?" a woman's voice called back from the
throng about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump. From where he
stood he could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they
had advanced a few steps beyond the wooden sides of the storm-door;
but through its cracks he heard a clear voice answer: "Mercy no! Not
on such a night."

She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In
another moment she would step forth into the night, and his eyes,
accustomed to the obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though
she stood in daylight. A wave of shyness pulled him back into the
dark angle of the wall, and he stood there in silence instead of
making his presence known to her. It had been one of the wonders of
their intercourse that from the first, she, the quicker, finer, more
expressive, instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him
something of her own ease and freedom; but now he felt as heavy and
loutish as in his student days, when he had tried to "jolly" the
Worcester girls at a picnic.

He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards
of him. She was almost the last to leave the hall, and she stood
looking uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show
himself. Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that
under their formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim
outline.

"Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that's tough! No, I
wouldn't be mean enough to tell the other girls. I ain't as low-down
as that." (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) "But look a here,
ain't it lucky I got the old man's cutter down there waiting for
us?"

Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: "What on earth's
your father's cutter doin' down there?"

"Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I
kinder knew I'd want to take a ride to-night," Eady, in his triumph,
tried to put a sentimental note into his bragging voice.

The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her
scarf irresolutely about her fingers. Not for the world would he
have made a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung
on her next gesture.

"Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt," Denis called to her,
springing toward the shed.

She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of
tranquil expectancy torturing to the hidden watcher. Frome noticed
that she no longer turned her head from side to side, as though
peering through the night for another figure. She let Denis Eady
lead out the horse, climb into the cutter and fling back the
bearskin to make room for her at his side; then, with a swift motion
of flight, she turned about and darted up the slope toward the front
of the church.

"Good-bye! Hope you'll have a lovely ride!" she called back to him
over her shoulder.

Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly
abreast of her retreating figure.

"Come along! Get in quick! It's as slippery as thunder on this
turn," he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her.

She laughed back at him: "Good-night! I'm not getting in."

By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could
only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they
continued to move along the crest of the slope above him. He saw
Eady, after a moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl
with the reins over one arm. The other he tried to slip through
hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome's heart, which had swung
out over a black void, trembled back to safety. A moment later he
heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure
advancing alone toward the empty expanse of snow before the church.

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and
she turned with a quick "Oh!"

"Think I'd forgotten you, Matt?" he asked with sheepish glee.

She answered seriously: "I thought maybe you couldn't come back for
me."

"Couldn't? What on earth could stop me?"

"I knew Zeena wasn't feeling any too good to-day."

"Oh, she's in bed long ago." He paused, a question struggling in
him. "Then you meant to walk home all alone?"

"Oh, I ain't afraid!" she laughed.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world
glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars. He brought his
question out.

"If you thought I hadn't come, why didn't you ride back with Denis
Eady?"

"Why, where were you? How did you know? I never saw you!"

Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a
thaw. Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and
ingenious. To prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase,
and brought out, in a growl of rapture: "Come along."

He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was
faintly pressed against her side. but neither of them moved. It was
so dark under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her
head beside his shoulder. He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it
against her scarf. He would have liked to stand there with her all
night in the blackness. She moved forward a step or two and then
paused again above the dip of the Corbury road. Its icy slope,
scored by innumerable runners, looked like a mirror scratched by
travellers at an inn.

"There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set," she
said.

"Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?" he
asked.

"Oh, would you, Ethan? It would be lovely!"

"We'll come to-morrow if there's a moon."

She lingered, pressing closer to his side. "Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum
came just as near running into the big elm at the bottom. We were
all sure they were killed." Her shiver ran down his arm. "Wouldn't
it have been too awful? They're so happy!"

"Oh, Ned ain't much at steering. I guess I can take you down all
right!" he said disdainfully.

He was aware that he was "talking big," like Denis Eady; but his
reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the inflection with which
she had said of the engaged couple "They're so happy!" made the
words sound as if she had been thinking of herself and him.

"The elm is dangerous, though. It ought to be cut down," she
insisted.

"Would you be afraid of it, with me?"

"I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back, almost
indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk on with a rapid step.

These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome.
The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird
in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings,
and thus provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic
importance to every change in her look and tone. Now he thought she
understood him, and feared; now he was sure she did not, and
despaired. To-night the pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the
scale drooping toward despair, and her indifference was the more
chilling after the flush of joy into which she had plunged him by
dismissing Denis Eady. He mounted School House Hill at her side and
walked on in silence till they reached the lane leading to the
saw-mill; then the need of some definite assurance grew too strong
for him.

"You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to have that
last reel with Denis," he brought out awkwardly. He could not
pronounce the name without a stiffening of the muscles of his
throat.

"Why, Ethan, how could I tell you were there?"

"I suppose what folks say is true," he jerked out at her, instead of
answering.

She stopped short, and he felt, in the darkness, that her face was
lifted quickly to his. "Why, what do folks say?"

"It's natural enough you should be leaving us" he floundered on,
following his thought.

"Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden
drop of her sweet treble: "You mean that Zeena-ain't suited with me
any more?" she faltered.

Their arms had slipped apart and they stood motionless, each seeking
to distinguish the other's face.

"I know I ain't anything like as smart as I ought to be," she went
on, while he vainly struggled for expression. "There's lots of
things a hired girl could do that come awkward to me still-and I
haven't got much strength in my arms. But if she'd only tell me I'd
try. You know she hardly ever says anything, and sometimes I can see
she ain't suited, and yet I don't know why." She turned on him with
a sudden flash of indignation. "You'd ought to tell me, Ethan
Frome-you'd ought to! Unless you want me to go too-"

Unless he wanted her to go too! The cry was balm to his raw wound.
The iron heavens seemed to melt and rain down sweetness. Again he
struggled for the all-expressive word, and again, his arm in hers,
found only a deep "Come along."

They walked on in silence through the blackness of the
hemlock-shaded lane, where Ethan's sawmill gloomed through the
night, and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields.
On the farther side of the hemlock belt the open country rolled away
before them grey and lonely under the stars. Sometimes their way led
them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through the thin
obscurity of a clump of leafless trees. Here and there a farmhouse
stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a grave-stone. The
night was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under
their feet. The crash of a loaded branch falling far off in the
woods reverberated like a musket-shot, and once a fox barked, and
Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her steps.

At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as
they drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his
words.

"Then you don't want to leave us, Matt?"

He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper: "Where'd I
go, if I did?"

The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with
joy. He forgot what else he had meant to say and pressed her against
him so closely that he seemed to feel her warmth in his veins.

"You ain't crying are you, Matt?"

"No, of course I'm not," she quavered.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where,
enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy
angles through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years
that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for
change and freedom. "We never got away-how should you?" seemed to be
written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his
gate he thought with a shiver: "I shall just go on living here till
I join them." But now all desire for change had vanished, and the
sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance
and stability.

"I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though even
the dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and
brushing by the graves, he thought: "We'll always go on living here
together, and some day she'll lie there beside me."

He let the vision possess him as they climbed the hill to the house.
He was never so happy with her as when he abandoned himself to these
dreams. Half-way up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen
obstruction and clutched his sleeve to steady herself. The wave of
warmth that went through him was like the prolongation of his
vision. For the first time he stole his arm about her, and she did
not resist. They walked on as if they were floating on a summer
stream.

Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the
shutterless windows of the house were dark. A dead cucumber-vine
dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for
a death, and the thought flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was
there for Zeena-" Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in
their bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a
tumbler by the bed...

They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid
gooseberry bushes. It was Zeena's habit, when they came back late
from the village, to leave the key of the kitchen door under the
mat. Ethan stood before the door, his head heavy with dreams, his
arm still about Mattie. "Matt-" he began, not knowing what he meant
to say.

She slipped out of his hold without speaking, and he stooped down
and felt for the key.

"It's not there!" he said, straightening himself with a start.

They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness.
Such a thing had never happened before.

"Maybe she's forgotten it," Mattie said in a tremulous whisper; but
both of them knew that it was not like Zeena to forget.

"It might have fallen off into the snow," Mattie continued, after a
pause during which they had stood intently listening.

"It must have been pushed off, then," he rejoined in the same tone.
Another wild thought tore through him. What if tramps had been
there-what if...

Again he listened, fancying he heard a distant sound in the house;
then he felt in his pocket for a match, and kneeling down, passed
its light slowly over the rough edges of snow about the doorstep.

He was still kneeling when his eyes, on a level with the lower panel
of the door, caught a faint ray beneath it. Who could be stirring in
that silent house? He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an
instant the thought of tramps tore through him. Then the door opened
and he saw his wife.

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and
angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast,
while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin,
drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting
wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened
fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face
under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of
his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of
the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before
known what his wife looked like.

She drew aside without speaking, and Mattie and Ethan passed into
the kitchen, which had the deadly chill of a vault after the dry
cold of the night.

"Guess you forgot about us, Zeena," Ethan joked, stamping the snow
from his boots.

"No. I just felt so mean I couldn't sleep."

Mattie came forward, unwinding her wraps, the colour of the cherry
scarf in her fresh lips and cheeks. "I'm so sorry, Zeena! Isn't
there anything I can do?"

"No; there's nothing." Zeena turned away from her. "You might 'a'
shook off that snow outside," she said to her husband.

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall
raised the lamp at arm's-length, as if to light them up the stairs.

Ethan paused also, affecting to fumble for the peg on which he hung
his coat and cap. The doors of the two bedrooms faced each other
across the narrow upper landing, and to-night it was peculiarly
repugnant to him that Mattie should see him follow Zeena.

"I guess I won't come up yet awhile," he said, turning as if to go
back to the kitchen.

Zeena stopped short and looked at him. "For the land's sake-what you
going to do down here?"

"I've got the mill accounts to go over."

She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp
bringing out with microscopic cruelty the fretful lines of her face.

"At this time o' night? You'll ketch your death. The fire's out long
ago."

Without answering he moved away toward the kitchen. As he did so his
glance crossed Mattie's and he fancied that a fugitive warning
gleamed through her lashes. The next moment they sank to her flushed
cheeks and she began to mount the stairs ahead of Zeena.

"That's so. It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with
lowered head he went up in his wife's wake, and followed her across
the threshold of their room.