“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.

III

There was some hauling to be done at the lower end of the wood-lot, and Ethan was out early the next day.

The winter morning was as clear as crystal.  The sunrise burned red in a pure sky, the shadows on the rim of the wood-lot were darkly blue, and beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of far-off forest hung like smoke.

It was in the early morning stillness, when his muscles were swinging to their familiar task and his lungs expanding with long draughts of mountain air, that Ethan did his clearest thinking.  He and Zeena had not exchanged a word after the door of their room had closed on them.  She had measured out some drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed and, after swallowing them, and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow flannel, had lain down with her face turned away.  Ethan undressed hurriedly and blew out the light so that he should not see her when he took his place at her side.  As he lay there he could hear Mattie moving about in her room, and her candle, sending its small ray across the landing, drew a scarcely perceptible line of light under his door.  He kept his eyes fixed on the light till it vanished.  Then the room grew perfectly black, and not a sound was audible but Zeena’s asthmatic breathing.  Ethan felt confusedly that there were many things he ought to think about, but through his tingling veins and tired brain only one sensation throbbed:  the warmth of Mattie’s shoulder against his.  Why had he not kissed her when he held her there?  A few hours earlier he would not have asked himself the question.  Even a few minutes earlier, when they had stood alone outside the house, he would not have dared to think of kissing her.  But since he had seen her lips in the lamplight he felt that they were his.

Now, in the bright morning air, her face was still before him.  It was part of the sun’s red and of the pure glitter on the snow.  How the girl had changed since she had come to Starkfield!  He remembered what a colourless slip of a thing she had looked the day he had met her at the station.  And all the first winter, how she had shivered with cold when the northerly gales shook the thin clapboards and the snow beat like hail against the loose-hung windows!