He drew the lantern nearer and eagerly scanned the fares; then the paper fell from his hand and he pushed aside his unfinished letter.  A moment ago he had wondered what he and Mattie were to live on when they reached the West; now he saw that he had not even the money to take her there.  Borrowing was out of the question:  six months before he had given his only security to raise funds for necessary repairs to the mill, and he knew that without security no one at Starkfield would lend him ten dollars.  The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders handcuffing a convict.  There was no way out-none.  He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.

He crept back heavily to the sofa, stretching himself out with limbs so leaden that he felt as if they would never move again.  Tears rose in his throat and slowly burned their way to his lids.

As he lay there, the window-pane that faced him, growing gradually lighter, inlaid upon the darkness a square of moon-suffused sky.  A crooked tree-branch crossed it, a branch of the apple-tree under which, on summer evenings, he had sometimes found Mattie sitting when he came up from the mill.  Slowly the rim of the rainy vapours caught fire and burnt away, and a pure moon swung into the blue.  Ethan, rising on his elbow, watched the landscape whiten and shape itself under the sculpture of the moon.  This was the night on which he was to have taken Mattie coasting, and there hung the lamp to light them!  He looked out at the slopes bathed in lustre, the silver-edged darkness of the woods, the spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as though all the beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his wretchedness...

He fell asleep, and when he woke the chill of the winter dawn was in the room.  He felt cold and stiff and hungry, and ashamed of being hungry.  He rubbed his eyes and went to the window.  A red sun stood over the grey rim of the fields, behind trees that looked black and brittle.  He said to himself:  “This is Matt’s last day,” and tried to think what the place would be without her.

As he stood there he heard a step behind him and she entered.

“Oh, Ethan-were you here all night?”

She looked so small and pinched, in her poor dress, with the red scarf wound about her, and the cold light turning her paleness sallow, that Ethan stood before her without speaking.

“You must be frozen,” she went on, fixing lustreless eyes on him.

He drew a step nearer.  “How did you know I was here?”

“Because I heard you go down stairs again after I went to bed, and I listened all night, and you didn’t come up.”

All his tenderness rushed to his lips.  He looked at her and said:  “I’ll come right along and make up the kitchen fire.”