He flung the bearskin into the sleigh, climbed to the seat, and drove up to the house.  When he entered the kitchen it was empty, but Mattie’s bag and shawl lay ready by the door.  He went to the foot of the stairs and listened.  No sound reached him from above, but presently he thought he heard some one moving about in his deserted study, and pushing open the door he saw Mattie, in her hat and jacket, standing with her back to him near the table.

She started at his approach and turning quickly, said:  “Is it time?”

“What are you doing here, Matt?” he asked her.

She looked at him timidly.  “I was just taking a look round-that’s all,” she answered, with a wavering smile.

They went back into the kitchen without speaking, and Ethan picked up her bag and shawl.

“Where’s Zeena?” he asked.

“She went upstairs right after dinner.  She said she had those shooting pains again, and didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Didn’t she say good-bye to you?”

“No.  That was all she said.”

Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone.  Then the sense of unreality overcame him once more, and he could not bring himself to believe that Mattie stood there for the last time before him.

“Come on,” he said almost gaily, opening the door and putting her bag into the sleigh.  He sprang to his seat and bent over to tuck the rug about her as she slipped into the place at his side.  “Now then, go ’long,” he said, with a shake of the reins that sent the sorrel placidly jogging down the hill.

“We got lots of time for a good ride, Matt!” he cried, seeking her hand beneath the fur and pressing it in his.  His face tingled and he felt dizzy, as if he had stopped in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day for a drink.

At the gate, instead of making for Starkfield, he turned the sorrel to the right, up the Bettsbridge road.  Mattie sat silent, giving no sign of surprise; but after a moment she said:  “Are you going round by Shadow Pond?”

He laughed and answered:  “I knew you’d know!”

She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown wave of hair.  They drove slowly up the road between fields glistening under the pale sun, and then bent to the right down a lane edged with spruce and larch.  Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills stained by mottlings of black forest flowed away in round white curves against the sky.  The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow.  As they entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the branches with the dropping needles.  Here the snow was so pure that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze.