“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.