He shook his head.  “No, not a word.”

She tossed the hair back from her forehead with a laugh.  “I guess I’m just nervous, then.  I’m not going to think about it any more.”

“Oh, no-don’t let’s think about it, Matt!”

The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart.  She sat silent, her hands clasped on her work, and it seemed to him that a warm current flowed toward him along the strip of stuff that still lay unrolled between them.  Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his finger-tips touched the end of the stuff.  A faint vibration of her lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless on the other end of the strip.

As they sat thus he heard a sound behind him and turned his head.  The cat had jumped from Zeena’s chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot, and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a spectral rocking.

“She’ll be rocking in it herself this time to-morrow,” Ethan thought.  “I’ve been in a dream, and this is the only evening we’ll ever have together.”  The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic.  His body and brain ached with indescribable weariness, and he could think of nothing to say or to do that should arrest the mad flight of the moments.

His alteration of mood seemed to have communicated itself to Mattie.  She looked up at him languidly, as though her lids were weighted with sleep and it cost her an effort to raise them.  Her glance fell on his hand, which now completely covered the end of her work and grasped it as if it were a part of herself.  He saw a scarcely perceptible tremor cross her face, and without knowing what he did he stooped his head and kissed the bit of stuff in his hold.  As his lips rested on it he felt it glide slowly from beneath them, and saw that Mattie had risen and was silently rolling up her work.  She fastened it with a pin, and then, finding her thimble and scissors, put them with the roll of stuff into the box covered with fancy paper which he had once brought to her from Bettsbridge.

He stood up also, looking vaguely about the room.  The clock above the dresser struck eleven.

“Is the fire all right?” she asked in a low voice.

He opened the door of the stove and poked aimlessly at the embers.  When he raised himself again he saw that she was dragging toward the stove the old soap-box lined with carpet in which the cat made its bed.  Then she recrossed the floor and lifted two of the geranium pots in her arms, moving them away from the cold window.  He followed her and brought the other geraniums, the hyacinth bulbs in a cracked custard bowl and the German ivy trained over an old croquet hoop.