Ethan Frome ........................................................................................................................................................1

Edith Wharton ..........................................................................................................................................1

Author's Note ..........................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................................................2

CHAPTER I ............................................................................................................................................9

CHAPTER II .........................................................................................................................................13

CHAPTER III .......................................................................................................................................18

CHAPTER IV .......................................................................................................................................21

CHAPTER V ........................................................................................................................................27

CHAPTER VI .......................................................................................................................................30

CHAPTER VII ......................................................................................................................................33

CHAPTER VIII ....................................................................................................................................40

CHAPTER IX .......................................................................................................................................45

I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my

imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar

to me. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction

bore little except a vague botanical and dialectical resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had

seen it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweetfern, asters and mountainlaurel, and the conscientious

reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been

overlooked. I give the impression merely as a personal one; it accounts for "Ethan Frome," and may, to some

So much for the origin of the story; there is nothing else of interest to say of it, except as concerns its

The problem before me, as I saw in the first flash, was this: I had to deal with a subject of which the dramatic

climax, or rather the anticlimax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy. This enforced

lapse of time would seem to anyone persuaded as I have always been that every subject (in the novelist's

sense of the term) implicitly contains its own form and dimensions, to mark Ethan Frome as the subject for a

novel. But I never thought this for a moment, for I had felt, at the same time, that the theme of my tale was

not one on which many variations could be played. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had

always presented itself to my protagonists; any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would

necessarily have falsified the whole. They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings; but

This incompatibility between subject and plan would perhaps have seemed to suggest that my "situation" was

after all one to be rejected. Every novelist has been visited by the insinuating wraiths of false "good

situations," sirensubjects luring his cockleshell to the rocks; their voice is oftenest heard, and their

miragesea beheld, as he traverses the waterless desert which awaits him halfway through whatever work is

actually in hand. I knew well enough what song those sirens sang, and had often tied myself to my dull job

until they were out of hearing perhaps carrying a lost masterpiece in their rainbow veils. But I had no such

fear of them in the case of Ethan Frome. It was the first subject I had ever approached with full confidence in

its value, for my own purpose, and a relative faith in my power to render at least a part of what I saw in it.

Every novelist, again, who "intends upon" his art, has lit upon such subjects, and been fascinated by the

difficulty of presenting them in the fullest relief, yet without an added ornament, or a trick of drapery or

lighting. This was my task, if I were to tell the story of Ethan Frome; and my scheme of construction which

met with the immediate and unqualified disapproval of the few friends to whom I tentatively outlined it I

still think justified in the given case. It appears to me, indeed, that, while an air of artificiality is lent to a tale

of complex and sophisticated people which the novelist causes to be guessed at and interpreted by any mere

lookeron, there need be no such drawback if the lookeron is sophisticated, and the people he interprets are

simple. If he is capable of seeing all around them, no violence is done to probability in allowing him to

exercise this faculty; it is natural enough that he should act as the sympathizing intermediary between his

rudimentary characters and the more complicated minds to whom he is trying to present them. But this is all

selfevident, and needs explaining only to those who have never thought of fiction as an art of composition.

The real merit of my construction seems to me to lie in a minor detail. I had to find means to bring my

tragedy, in a way at once natural and picturemaking, to the knowledge of its narrator. I might have sat him

down before a village gossip who would have poured out the whole affair to him in a breath, but in doing this

I should have been false to two essential elements of my picture: first, the deeprooted reticence and

inarticulateness of the people I was trying to draw, and secondly the effect of "roundness" (in the plastic

sense) produced by letting their case be seen through eyes as different as those of Harmon Gow and Mrs. Ned

Hale. Each of my chroniclers contributes to the narrative just so much as he or she is capable of

understanding of what, to them, is a complicated and mysterious case; and only the narrator of the tale has

scope enough to see it all, to resolve it back into simplicity, and to put it in its rightful place among his larger

I make no claim for originality in following a method of which "La Grande Breteche" and "The Ring and the

Book" had set me the magnificent example; my one merit is, perhaps, to have guessed that the proceeding

I have written this brief analysis the first I have ever published of any of my books because, as an author's

introduction to his work, I can imagine nothing of any value to his readers except a statement as to why he

decided to attempt the work in question, and why he selected one form rather than another for its

embodiment. These primary aims, the only ones that can be explicitly stated, must, by the artist, be almost

instinctively felt and acted upon before there can pass into his creation that imponderable something more

I HAD THE STORY, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it

was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the postoffice. If you know the

postoffice you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollowbacked bay and drag

himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was.

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then

he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his

great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the

stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like

the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and

grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fiftytwo. I had

this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pretrolley days and

"He's looked that way ever since he had his smashup; and that's twentyfour years ago come next

The "smashup" it was I gathered from the same informant which, besides drawing the red gash across

Ethan Frome's forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a visible effort to take the

few steps from his buggy to the postoffice window. He used to drive in from his farm every day at about

noon, and as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed him in the porch or stood beside him

while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he came so

punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle, which he put without a glance

into his sagging pocket. At intervals, however, the postmaster would hand him an envelope addressed to

Mrs. Zenobia or Mrs. Zeena Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper lefthand corner the

address of some manufacturer of patent medicine and the name of his specific. These documents my

neighbour would also pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their number and

Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien; but his

taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained

him for a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker's face, and answer

in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the

"It was a pretty bad smashup?" I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome's retreating figure, and thinking

how gallantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before

"Wust kind," my informant assented. "More'n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan'll

"Good God!" I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure

himself of the security of a wooden box also with a druggist's label on it which he had placed in the back

of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself alone. "That man touch a

Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it into the leather pouch of his

cheek. "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away."

"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn't ever anybody but Ethan. Fust his father then his

Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. "Oh, as to that: I guess it's always Ethan done the

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were

perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent

Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate

day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain

villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and

Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter shut down on

Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see

what life there or rather its negation must have been in Ethan Frome's young manhood.

I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big powerhouse at Corbury Junction, and a

longdrawn carpenters' strike had so delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfield the nearest

habitable spot for the best part of the winter. I chafed at first, and then, under the hypnotising effect of

routine, gradually began to find a grim satisfaction in the life. During the early part of my stay I had been

struck by the contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the community. Day by day,

after the December snows were over, a blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the white

landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter. One would have supposed that such an atmosphere

must quicken the emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change except that of retarding

still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield. When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of

crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their

white tents about the. devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their

support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison

capitulating without quarter. Twenty years earlier the means of resistance must have been far fewer, and the

enemy in command of almost all the lines of access between the beleaguered villages; and, considering these

things, I felt the sinister force of Harmon's phrase: "Most of the smart ones get away." But if that were the

case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the flight of a man like Ethan Frome?

During my stay at Starkfield I lodged with a middleaged widow colloquially known as Mrs. Ned Hale. Mrs.

Hale's father had been the village lawyer of the previous generation, and "lawyer Varnum's house," where my

landlady still lived with her mother, was the most considerable mansion in the village. It stood at one end of

the main street, its classic portico and smallpaned windows looking down a flagged path between Norway

spruces to the slim white steeple of the Congregational church. It was clear that the Varnum fortunes were at

the ebb, but the two women did what they could to preserve a decent dignity; and Mrs. Hale, in particular,

had a certain wan refinement not out of keeping with her pale oldfashioned house.

In the "best parlour," with its black horsehair and mahogany weakly illuminated by a gurgling Carcel lamp,

I listened every evening to another and more delicately shaded version of the Starkfield chronicle. It was not

that Mrs. Ned Hale felt, or affected, any social superiority to the people about her; it was only that the

accident of a finer sensibility and a little more education had put just enough distance between herself and her

neighbours to enable her to judge them with detachment. She was not unwilling to exercise this faculty, and I

had great hopes of getting from her the missing facts of Ethan Frome's story, or rather such a key to his

character as should coordinate the facts I knew. Her mind was a storehouse of innocuous anecdote and any

question about her acquaintances brought forth a volume of detail; but on the subject of Ethan Frome I found

her unexpectedly reticent. There was no hint of disapproval in her reserve; I merely felt in her an

insurmountable reluctance to speak of him or his affairs, a low "Yes, I knew them both... it was awful..."

seeming to be the utmost concession that her distress could make to my curiosity.

So marked was the change in her manner, such depths of sad initiation did it imply, that, with some doubts as

to my delicacy, I put the case anew to my village oracle, Harmon Gow; but got for my pains only an

"Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of it, she was the first one to see 'em after

they was picked up. It happened right below lawyer Varnum's, down at the bend of the Corbury road, just

round about the time that Ruth got engaged to Ned Hale. The young folks was all friends, and I guess she just

All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had troubles enough of their own to make

them comparatively indifferent to those of their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome's had

been beyond the common measure, no one gave me an explanation of the look in his face which, as I

persisted in thinking, neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put there. Nevertheless, I might have

contented myself with the story pieced together from these hints had it not been for the provocation of Mrs.

Hale's silence, and a little later for the accident of personal contact with the man.

On my arrival at Starkfield, Denis Eady, the rich Irish grocer, who was the proprietor of Starkfield's nearest

approach to a livery stable, had entered into an agreement to send me over daily to Corbury Flats, where I had

to pick up my train for the Junction. But about the middle of the winter Eady's horses fell ill of a local

epidemic. The illness spread to the other Starkfield stables and for a day or two I was put to it to find a means

of transport. Then Harmon Gow suggested that Ethan Frome's bay was still on his legs and that his owner

I stared at the suggestion. "Ethan Frome? But I've never even spoken to him. Why on earth should he put

Harmon's answer surprised me still more. "I don't know as he would; but I know he wouldn't be sorry to earn

I had been told that Frome was poor, and that the sawmill and the arid acres of his farm yielded scarcely

enough to keep his household through the winter; but I had not supposed him to be in such want as Harmon's

"Well, matters ain't gone any too well with him," Harmon said. "When a man's been setting round like a hulk

for twenty years or more, seeing things that want doing, it eats inter him, and he loses his grit. That Frome

farm was always 'bout as bare's a milkpan when the cat's been round; and you know what one of them old

watermills is wuth nowadays. When Ethan could sweat over 'em both from sunup to dark he kinder choked

a living out of 'em; but his folks ate up most everything, even then, and I don't see how he makes out now.

Fust his father got a kick, out haying, and went soft in the brain, and gave away money like Bible texts afore

he died. Then his mother got queer and dragged along for years as weak as a baby; and his wife Zeena, she's

always been the greatest hand at doctoring in the county. Sickness and trouble: that's what Ethan's had his

The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollowbacked bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan

Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week,

he drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and

carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield. The distance each way was barely three miles, but the old

bay's pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were nearly an hour on the way. Ethan

Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the

helmetlike peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never

turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries

as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all

that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his

silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the

sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had

in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Only once or twice was the distance between us bridged for a moment; and the glimpses thus gained

confirmed my desire to know more. Once I happened to speak of an engineering job I had been on the

previous year in Florida, and of the contrast between the winter landscape about us and that in which I had

found myself the year before; and to my surprise Frome said suddenly: "Yes: I was down there once, and for

a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under." He said no

more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his voice and his sharp relapse into silence.

Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume of popular science I think it was on

some recent discoveries in biochemistry which I had carried with me to read on the way. I thought no more

about it till I got into the sleigh again that evening, and saw the book in Frome's hand.

I put the volume into my pocket and we dropped back into our usual silence; but as we began to crawl up the

long hill from Corbury Flats to the Starkfield ridge I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his face to

"There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word about," he said.

I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in his voice. He was evidently surprised and

"There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been some big strides lately in that particular

line of research." I waited a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: "If you'd like to look the

He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then,

I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication between us. Frome was so simple

and straightforward that I was sure his curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject.

Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast more poignant between his outer

situation and his inner needs, and I hoped that the chance of giving expression to the latter might at least

unseal his lips. But something in his past history, or in his present way of living, had apparently driven him

too deeply into himself for any casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. At our next meeting he made no

allusion to the book, and our intercourse seemed fated to remain as negative and onesided as if there had

Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one morning I looked out of my window

into a thick snowfall. The height of the white waves massed against the gardenfence and along the wall of

the church showed that the storm must have been going on all night, and that the drifts were likely to be

heavy in the open. I thought it probable that my train would be delayed; but I had to be at the powerhouse

for an hour or two that afternoon, and I decided, if Frome turned up, to push through to the Flats and wait

there till my train came in. I don't know why I put it in the conditional, however, for I never doubted that

Frome would appear. He was not the kind of man to be turned from his business by any commotion of the

elements; and at the appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a stageapparition behind

I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude at his keeping his appointment; but I

exclaimed in surprise as I saw him turn his horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road.

"The railroad's blocked by a freighttrain that got stuck in a drift below the Flats," he explained, as we jogged

"Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way," he answered, pointing up School House Hill with his whip.

"The bay'll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business there this afternoon. I'll see you get

He said it so quietly that I could only answer: "You're doing me the biggest kind of a favour."

Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane to the left, between hemlock boughs

bent inward to their trunks by the weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew that

the solitary roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of the hill was that of Frome's sawmill. It

looked exanimate enough, with its idle wheel looming above the black stream dashed with yellowwhite

spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome did not even turn his head as we drove

by, and still in silence we began to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never

travelled, we came to an orchard of starved appletrees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate

that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a

field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of

land and sky, one of those lonely New England farmhouses that make the landscape lonelier.

"That's my place," said Frome, with a sideway jerk of his lame elbow; and in the distress and oppression of

the scene I did not know what to answer. The snow had ceased, and a flash of watery sunlight exposed the

house on the slope above us in all its plaintive ugliness. The black wraith of a deciduous creeper flapped from

the porch, and the thin wooden walls, under their worn coat of paint, seemed to shiver in the wind that had

"The house was bigger in my father's time: I had to take down the 'L,' a while back," Frome continued,

checking with a twitch of the left rein the bay's evident intention of turning in through the brokendown gate.

I saw then that the unusually forlorn and stunted look of the house was partly due to the loss of what is

known in New England as the "L": that long deeproofed adjunct usually built at right angles to the main

house, and connecting it, by way of storerooms and toolhouse, with the woodshed and cowbarn. Whether

because of its symbolic sense, the image it presents of a life linked with the soil, and enclosing in itself the

chief sources of warmth and nourishment, or whether merely because of the consolatory thought that it

enables the dwellers in that harsh climate to get to their morning's work without facing the weather, it is

certain that the "L" rather than the house itself seems to be the centre, the actual hearthstone of the New

England farm. Perhaps this connection of ideas, which had often occurred to me in my rambles about

Starkfield, caused me to hear a wistful note in Frome's words, and to see in the diminished dwelling the

"We're kinder sidetracked here now," he added, "but there was considerable passing before the railroad was

carried through to the Flats." He roused the lagging bay with another twitch; then, as if the mere sight of the

house had let me too deeply into his confidence for any farther pretence of reserve, he went on slowly: "I've

always set down the worst of mother's trouble to that. When she got the rheumatism so bad she couldn't move

around she used to sit up there and watch the road by the hour; and one year, when they was six months

mending the Bettsbridge pike after the floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage round this way, she

picked up so that she used to get down to the gate most days to see him. But after the trains begun running

nobody ever come by here to speak of, and mother never could get it through her head what had happened,

As we turned into the Corbury road the snow began to fall again, cutting off our last glimpse of the house;

and Frome's silence fell with it, letting down between us the old veil of reticence. This time the wind did not

cease with the return of the snow. Instead, it sprang up to a gale which now and then, from a tattered sky,

flung pale sweeps of sunlight over a landscape chaotically tossed. But the bay was as good as Frome's word,

In the afternoon the storm held off, and the clearness in the west seemed to my inexperienced eye the pledge

of a fair evening. I finished my business as quickly as possible, and we set out for Starkfield with a good

chance of getting there for supper. But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the

snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing

than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter

The small ray of Frome's lantern was soon lost in this smothering medium, in which even his sense of

direction, and the bay's homing instinct, finally ceased to serve us. Two or three times some ghostly landmark

sprang up to warn us that we were astray, and then was sucked back into the mist; and when we finally

regained our road the old horse began to show signs of exhaustion. I felt myself to blame for having accepted

Frome's offer, and after a short discussion I persuaded him to let me get out of the sleigh and walk along

through the snow at the bay's side. In this way we struggled on for another mile or two, and at last reached a

point where Frome, peering into what seemed to me formless night, said: "That's my gate down yonder."

The last stretch had been the hardest part of the way. The bitter cold and the heavy going had nearly knocked

the wind out of me, and I could feel the horse's side ticking like a clock under my hand.

"Look here, Frome," I began, "there's no earthly use in your going any farther" but he interrupted me: "Nor

I understood that he was offering me a night's shelter at the farm, and without answering I turned into the gate

at his side, and followed him to the barn, where I helped him to unharness and bed down the tired horse.

When this was done he unhooked the lantern from the sleigh, stepped out again into the night, and called to

Far off above us a square of light trembled through the screen of snow. Staggering along in Frome's wake I

floundered toward it, and in the darkness almost fell into one of the deep drifts against the front of the house.

Frome scrambled up the slippery steps of the porch, digging a way through the snow with his heavily booted

foot. Then he lifted his lantern, found the latch, and led the way into the house. I went after him into a low

unlit passage, at the back of which a ladderlike staircase rose into obscurity. On our right a line of light

marked the door of the room which had sent its ray across the night; and behind the door I heard a woman's

Frome stamped on the worn oilcloth to shake the snow from his boots, and set down his lantern on a kitchen

chair which was the only piece of furniture in the hall. Then he opened the door.

It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story.

THE VILLAGE lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the

Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent

that the white housefronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black

stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless

undulations. Young Ethan Frome walked at a quick pace along the deserted street, past the bank and Michael

Eady's new brick store and Lawyer Varnum's house with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite

the Varnum gate, where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the church reared its slim white steeple

and narrow peristyle. As the young man walked toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade along the

side wall of the building, but from the lower openings, on the side where the ground sloped steeply down to

the Corbury road, the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in the track leading to the

basement door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect

produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than

ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead. "It's like being in an

exhausted receiver," he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year's course at a technological

college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the images

supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally different

associations of thought in which he had since been living. His father's death, and the misfortunes following it,

had put a premature end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical

use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his brain and mingled with the

bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp. At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the

church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not

another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's spruces, was the favourite

coastingground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts of the

coasters; but tonight not a sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay on the

village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church windows, from which strains of dancemusic

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope toward the basement door. To keep out

of range of the revealing rays from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually

approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging the shadow, he edged his way

cautiously forward to the nearest window, holding back his straight spare body and craning his neck till he

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The

metal reflectors of the gasjets sent crude waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and the iron flanks

of the stove at the end of the hall looked as though they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was

thronged with girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of kitchen chairs from

which the older women had just risen. By this time the music had stopped, and the musicians a fiddler, and

the young lady who played the harmonium on Sundays were hastily refreshing themselves at one corner of

the suppertable which aligned its devastated piedishes and icecream saucers on the platform at the end of

the hall. The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward the passage where coats and

wraps were hung, when a young man with a sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of

the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect. The musicians hurried to their instruments, the

dancers some already halfmuffled for departure fell into line down each side of the room, the older

spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young man, after diving about here and there in the

throng, drew forth a girl who had already wound a cherrycoloured "fascinator" about her head, and, leading

her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its length to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.

Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse of the dark head under the

cherrycoloured scarf and it vexed him that another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the

reel, who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his partner caught his fire. As she

passed down the line, her light figure swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf

flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each turn, caught sight of her laughing

panting lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points

The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep up with them, belaboured their

instruments like jockeys lashing their mounts on the homestretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the

window that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the girl's face to that of her

partner, which, in the exhilaration of the dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership. Denis

Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given

Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of

the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the

conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow;

but now he positively invited a horsewhipping. It was strange that the girl did not seem aware of it: that she

could lift her rapt face to her dancer's, and drop her hands into his, without appearing to feel the offence of

Frome was in the habit of walking into Starkfield to fetch home his wife's cousin, Mattie Silver, on the rare

evenings when some chance of amusement drew her to the village. It was his wife who had suggested, when

the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be put in her way. Mattie Silver came from

Stamford, and when she entered the Fromes' household to act as her cousin Zeena's aid it was thought best, as

she came without pay, not to let her feel too sharp a contrast between the life she had left and the isolation of

a Starkfield farm. But for this as Frome sardonically reflected it would hardly have occurred to Zeena to

When his wife first proposed that they should give Mattie an occasional evening out he had inwardly

demurred at having to do the extra two miles to the village and back after his hard day on the farm; but not

long afterward he had reached the point of wishing that Starkfield might give all its nights to revelry.

Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early morning till they met at supper he had

frequent chances of seeing her; but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in

his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they walked back through the night to the farm.

He had taken to the girl from the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats to meet her, and she had

smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, "You must be Ethan!" as she jumped down with her

bundles, while he reflected, looking over her slight person: "She don't look much on housework, but she ain't

a fretter, anyhow." But it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the

lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her.

She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of

feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communion.

He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished

studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with

a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with

sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or

whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled

with the same touch of wonder: that at his side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to

whom he could say: "That's Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is Aldebaran, and the bunch of

little ones like bees swarming they're the Pleiades..." or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of

granite thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice age, and the long dim

stretches of succeeding time. The fact that admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie's wonder at what

he taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other sensations, less definable but more

exquisite, which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the

flight of cloudflocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit

snow. When she said to him once: "It looks just as if it was painted!" it seemed to Ethan that the art of

definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul....

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished

things. Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have

thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed

plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always

looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity,

he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her

laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

The sight made him unhappy, and his unhappiness roused his latent fears. His wife had never shown any

jealousy of Mattie, but of late she had grumbled increasingly over the housework and found oblique ways of

attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena had always been what Starkfield called "sickly," and

Frome had to admit that, if she were as ailing as she believed, she needed the help of a stronger arm than the

one which lay so lightly in his during the night walks to the farm. Mattie had no natural turn for

housekeeping, and her training had done nothing to remedy the defect. She was quick to learn, but forgetful

and dreamy, and not disposed to take the matter seriously. Ethan had an idea that if she were to marry a man

she was fond of the dormant instinct would wake, and her pies and biscuits become the pride of the county;

but domesticity in the abstract did not interest her. At first she was so awkward that he could not help

laughing at her; but she laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to supplement

her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and

neglecting the mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day. He even crept down on

Saturday nights to scrub the kitchen floor after the women had gone to bed; and Zeena, one day, had

surprised him at the churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks.

Of late there had been other signs of her disfavour, as intangible but more disquieting. One cold winter

morning, as he dressed in the dark, his candle flickering in the draught of the illfitting window, he had heard

"The doctor don't want I should be left without anybody to do for me," she said in her flat whine.

He had supposed her to be asleep, and the sound of her voice had startled him, though she was given to

He turned and looked at her where she lay indistinctly outlined under the dark calico quilt, her highboned

Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the reflection of his stretched cheek in the

"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

Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw the razor from ear to chin. His hand was

"And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody," Zeena continued. "He wanted I should speak to

"Denis Eady! If that's all, I guess there's no such hurry to look round for a girl."

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,"

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:

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....

AS THE DANCERS poured out of the hall Frome, drawing back behind the projecting stormdoor, 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. "Ain't you

riding, Mattie?" a woman's voice called back from the throng about the shed, and Ethan's heart gave a jump.

From where he stood he could not see the persons coming out of the hall till they had advanced a few steps

beyond the wooden sides of the stormdoor; but through its cracks he heard a clear voice answer: "Mercy no!

She was there, then, close to him, only a thin board between. In another moment she would step forth into the

night, and his eyes, accustomed to the obscurity, would discern her as clearly as though she stood in daylight.

A wave of shyness pulled him back into the dark angle of the wall, and he stood there in silence instead of

making his presence known to her. It had been one of the wonders of their intercourse that from the first, she,

the quicker, finer, more expressive, instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him something of her

own ease and freedom; but now he felt as heavy and loutish as in his student days, when he had tried to

He hung back, and she came out alone and paused within a few yards of him. She was almost the last to leave

the hall, and she stood looking uncertainly about her as if wondering why he did not show himself. Then a

man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their formless wrappings they seemed merged in

"Gentleman friend gone back on you? Say, Matt, that's tough! No, I wouldn't be mean enough to tell the other

girls. I ain't as lowdown as that." (How Frome hated his cheap banter!) "But look a here, ain't it lucky I got

Frome heard the girl's voice, gaily incredulous: "What on earth's your father's cutter doin' down there?"

"Why, waiting for me to take a ride. I got the roan colt too. I kinder knew I'd want to take a ride tonight,"

The girl seemed to waver, and Frome saw her twirl the end of her scarf irresolutely about her fingers. Not for

the world would he have made a sign to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.

"Hold on a minute while I unhitch the colt," Denis called to her, springing toward the shed.

She stood perfectly still, looking after him, in an attitude of tranquil expectancy torturing to the hidden

watcher. Frome noticed that she no longer turned her head from side to side, as though peering through the

night for another figure. She let Denis Eady lead out the horse, climb into the cutter and fling back the

bearskin to make room for her at his side; then, with a swift motion of flight, she turned about and darted up

"Goodbye! Hope you'll have a lovely ride!" she called back to him over her shoulder.

Denis laughed, and gave the horse a cut that brought him quickly abreast of her retreating figure.

"Come along! Get in quick! It's as slippery as thunder on this turn," he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand

By this time they had passed beyond Frome's earshot and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of

their silhouettes as they continued to move along the crest of the slope above him. He saw Eady, after a

moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl with the reins over one arm. The other he tried to slip

through hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome's heart, which had swung out over a black void,

trembled back to safety. A moment later he heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she turned with a quick "Oh!"

"Oh, she's in bed long ago." He paused, a question struggling in him. "Then you meant to walk home all

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under

Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw. Ethan had the sense of having done

something arch and ingenious. To prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in a

He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was faintly pressed against her side. but

neither of them moved. It was so dark under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her head beside

his shoulder. He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it against her scarf. He would have liked to stand there

with her all night in the blackness. She moved forward a step or two and then paused again above the dip of

the Corbury road. Its icy slope, scored by innumerable runners, looked like a mirror scratched by travellers at

She lingered, pressing closer to his side. "Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum came just as near running into the big

elm at the bottom. We were all sure they were killed." Her shiver ran down his arm. "Wouldn't it have been

"Oh, Ned ain't much at steering. I guess I can take you down all right!" he said disdainfully.

He was aware that he was "talking big," like Denis Eady; but his reaction of joy had unsteadied him, and the

inflection with which she had said of the engaged couple "They're so happy!" made the words sound as if she

"I told you I ain't the kind to be afraid" she tossed back, almost indifferently; and suddenly she began to walk

These alterations of mood were the despair and joy of Ethan Frome. The motions of her mind were as

incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches. The fact that he had no right to show his feelings, and thus

provoke the expression of hers, made him attach a fantastic importance to every change in her look and tone.

Now he thought she understood him, and feared; now he was sure she did not, and despaired. Tonight the

pressure of accumulated misgivings sent the scale drooping toward despair, and her indifference was the

more chilling after the flush of joy into which she had plunged him by dismissing Denis Eady. He mounted

School House Hill at her side and walked on in silence till they reached the lane leading to the sawmill; then

"You'd have found me right off if you hadn't gone back to have that last reel with Denis," he brought out

awkwardly. He could not pronounce the name without a stiffening of the muscles of his throat.

She stopped short, and he felt, in the darkness, that her face was lifted quickly to his. "Why, what do folks

"It's natural enough you should be leaving us" he floundered on, following his thought.

"Is that what they say?" she mocked back at him; then, with a sudden drop of her sweet treble: "You mean

Their arms had slipped apart and they stood motionless, each seeking to distinguish the other's face.

"I know I ain't anything like as smart as I ought to be," she went on, while he vainly struggled for expression.

"There's lots of things a hired girl could do that come awkward to me still and I haven't got much strength in

my arms. But if she'd only tell me I'd try. You know she hardly ever says anything, and sometimes I can see

she ain't suited, and yet I don't know why." She turned on him with a sudden flash of indignation. "You'd

Unless he wanted her to go too! The cry was balm to his raw wound. The iron heavens seemed to melt and

rain down sweetness. Again he struggled for the allexpressive word, and again, his arm in hers, found only a

They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlockshaded lane, where Ethan's sawmill

gloomed through the night, and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields. On the farther side of

the hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars. Sometimes their

way led them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless

trees. Here and there a farmhouse stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a gravestone. The night

was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet. The crash of a loaded branch falling far

off in the woods reverberated like a musketshot, and once a fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan,

At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan's gate, and as they drew near it the sense that the walk

He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper: "Where'd I go, if I did?"

The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy. He forgot what else he had meant to

say and pressed her against him so closely that he seemed to feel her warmth in his veins.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome

gravestones slanted at crazy angles through the snow. Ethan looked at them curiously. For years that quiet

company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom. "We never got away how should

you?" seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a

shiver: "I shall just go on living here till I join them." But now all desire for change had vanished, and the

sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability.

"I guess we'll never let you go, Matt," he whispered, as though even the dead, lovers once, must conspire with

him to keep her; and brushing by the graves, he thought: "We'll always go on living here together, and some

He let the vision possess him as they climbed the hill to the house. He was never so happy with her as when

he abandoned himself to these dreams. Halfway up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen

obstruction and clutched his sleeve to steady herself. The wave of warmth that went through him was like the

prolongation of his vision. For the first time he stole his arm about her, and she did not resist. They walked on

Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the shutterless windows of the house were

dark. A dead cucumbervine dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and

the thought flashed through Ethan's brain: "If it was there for Zeena" Then he had a distinct sight of his wife

lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...

They walked around to the back of the house, between the rigid gooseberry bushes. It was Zeena's habit,

when they came back late from the village, to leave the key of the kitchen door under the mat. Ethan stood

before the door, his head heavy with dreams, his arm still about Mattie. "Matt" he began, not knowing what

She slipped out of his hold without speaking, and he stooped down and felt for the key.

They strained their eyes at each other through the icy darkness. Such a thing had never happened before.

"Maybe she's forgotten it," Mattie said in a tremulous whisper; but both of them knew that it was not like

"It might have fallen off into the snow," Mattie continued, after a pause during which they had stood intently

"It must have been pushed off, then," he rejoined in the same tone. Another wild thought tore through him.

Again he listened, fancying he heard a distant sound in the house; then he felt in his pocket for a match, and

kneeling down, passed its light slowly over the rough edges of snow about the doorstep.

He was still kneeling when his eyes, on a level with the lower panel of the door, caught a faint ray beneath it.

Who could be stirring in that silent house? He heard a step on the stairs, and again for an instant the thought

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted

counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the

darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened

fantastically the hollows and prominences of her highboned face under its ring of crimpingpins. To Ethan,

still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream

before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.

She drew aside without speaking, and Mattie and Ethan passed into the kitchen, which had the deadly chill of

"Guess you forgot about us, Zeena," Ethan joked, stamping the snow from his boots.

Mattie came forward, unwinding her wraps, the colour of the cherry scarf in her fresh lips and cheeks. "I'm so

"No; there's nothing." Zeena turned away from her. "You might 'a' shook off that snow outside," she said to

She walked out of the kitchen ahead of them and pausing in the hall raised the lamp at arm'slength, as if to

Ethan paused also, affecting to fumble for the peg on which he hung his coat and cap. The doors of the two

bedrooms faced each other across the narrow upper landing, and tonight it was peculiarly repugnant to him

"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?"

She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp bringing out with microscopic cruelty the

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

"That's so. It is powerful cold down here," Ethan assented; and with lowered head he went up in his wife's

THERE WAS some hauling to be done at the lower end of the woodlot, 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 woodlot were darkly blue, and beyond the white and scintillating fields patches of faroff forest hung

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

medicinebottle 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

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

He had been afraid that she would hate the hard life, the cold and loneliness; but not a sign of discontent

escaped her. Zeena took the view that Mattie was bound to make the best of Starkfield since she hadn't any

other place to go to; but this did not strike Ethan as conclusive. Zeena, at any rate, did not apply the principle

He felt all the more sorry for the girl because misfortune had, in a sense, indentured her to them. Mattie Silver

was the daughter of a cousin of Zenobia Frome's, who had inflamed his clan with mingled sentiments of envy

and admiration by descending from the hills to Connecticut, where he had married a Stamford girl and

succeeded to her father's thriving "drug" business. Unhappily Orin Silver, a man of farreaching aims, had

died too soon to prove that the end justifies the means. His accounts revealed merely what the means had

been; and these were such that it was fortunate for his wife and daughter that his books were examined only

after his impressive funeral. His wife died of the disclosure, and Mattie, at twenty, was left alone to make her

way on the fifty dollars obtained from the sale of her piano. For this purpose her equipment, though varied,

was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite "Curfew shall not ring tonight," and play

"The Lost Chord" and a potpourri from "Carmen." When she tried to extend the field of her activities in the

direction of stenography and bookkeeping her health broke down, and six months on her feet behind the

counter of a department store did not tend to restore it. Her nearest relations had been induced to place their

savings in her father's hands, and though, after his death, they ungrudgingly acquitted themselves of the

Christian duty of returning good for evil by giving his daughter all the advice at their disposal, they could

hardly be expected to supplement it by material aid. But when Zenobia's doctor recommended her looking

about for some one to help her with the housework the clan instantly saw the chance of exacting a

compensation from Mattie. Zenobia, though doubtful of the girl's efficiency, was tempted by the freedom to

Zenobia's faultfinding was of the silent kind, but not the less penetrating for that. During the first months

Ethan alternately burned with the desire to see Mattie defy her and trembled with fear of the result. Then the

situation grew less strained. The pure air, and the long summer hours in the open, gave back life and elasticity

to Mattie, and Zeena, with more leisure to devote to her complex ailments, grew less watchful of the girl's

omissions; so that Ethan, struggling on under the burden of his barren farm and failing sawmill, could at

There was really, even now, no tangible evidence to the contrary; but since the previous night a vague dread

had hung on his skyline. It was formed of Zeena's obstinate silence, of Mattie's sudden look of warning, of

the memory of just such fleeting imperceptible signs as those which told him, on certain stainless mornings,

His dread was so strong that, manlike, he sought to postpone certainty. The hauling was not over till

midday, and as the lumber was to be delivered to Andrew Hale, the Starkfield builder, it was really easier

for Ethan to send Jotham Powell, the hired man, back to the farm on foot, and drive the load down to the

village himself. He had scrambled up on the logs, and was sitting astride of them, close over his shaggy

grays, when, coming between him and their streaming necks, he had a vision of the warning look that Mattie

"If there's going to be any trouble I want to be there," was his vague reflection, as he threw to Jotham the

It was a slow trudge home through the heavy fields, and when the two men entered the kitchen Mattie was

lifting the coffee from the stove and Zeena was already at the table. Her husband stopped short at sight of her.

Instead of her usual calico wrapper and knitted shawl she wore her best dress of brown merino, and above her

thin strands of hair, which still preserved the tight undulations of the crimpingpins, rose a hard

perpendicular bonnet, as to which Ethan's clearest notion was that he had to pay five dollars for it at the

Bettsbridge Emporium. On the floor beside her stood his old valise and a bandbox wrapped in newspapers.

"I've got my shooting pains so bad that I'm going over to Bettsbridge to spend the night with Aunt Martha

Pierce and see that new doctor," she answered in a matteroffact tone, as if she had said she was going into

the storeroom to take a look at the preserves, or up to the attic to go over the blankets.

In spite of her sedentary habits such abrupt decisions were not without precedent in Zeena's history. Twice or

thrice before she had suddenly packed Ethan's valise and started off to Bettsbridge, or even Springfield, to

seek the advice of some new doctor, and her husband had grown to dread these expeditions because of their

cost. Zeena always came back laden with expensive remedies, and her last visit to Springfield had been

commemorated by her paying twenty dollars for an electric battery of which she had never been able to learn

the use. But for the moment his sense of relief was so great as to preclude all other feelings. He had now no

doubt that Zeena had spoken the truth in saying, the night before, that she had sat up because she felt "too

mean" to sleep: her abrupt resolve to seek medical advice showed that, as usual, she was wholly absorbed in

As if expecting a protest, she continued plaintively; "If you're too busy with the hauling I presume you can let

Jotham Powell drive me over with the sorrel in time to ketch the train at the Flats."

Her husband hardly heard what she was saying. During the winter months there was no stage between

Starkfield and Bettsbridge, and the trains which stopped at Corbury Flats were slow and infrequent. A rapid

calculation showed Ethan that Zeena could not be back at the farm before the following evening....

"If I'd supposed you'd 'a' made any objection to Jotham Powell's driving me over" she began again, as

though his silence had implied refusal. On the brink of departure she was always seized with a flux of words.

"All I know is," she continued, "I can't go on the way I am much longer. The pains are clear away down to

my ankles now, or I'd 'a' walked in to Starkfield on my own feet, sooner'n put you out, and asked Michael

Eady to let me ride over on his wagon to the Flats, when he sends to meet the train that brings his groceries.

I'd 'a' had two hours to wait in the station, but I'd sooner 'a' done it, even with this cold, than to have you

"Of course Jotham'll drive you over," Ethan roused himself to answer. He became suddenly conscious that he

was looking at Mattie while Zeena talked to him, and with an effort he turned his eyes to his wife. She sat

opposite the window, and the pale light reflected from the banks of snow made her face look more than

usually drawn and bloodless, sharpened the three parallel creases between ear and cheek, and drew querulous

lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth. Though she was but seven years her husband's senior,

Ethan tried to say something befitting the occasion, but there was only one thought in his mind: the fact that,

for the first time since Mattie had come to live with them, Zeena was to be away for a night. He wondered if

He knew that Zeena must be wondering why he did not offer to drive her to the Flats and let Jotham Powell

take the lumber to Starkfield, and at first he could not think of a pretext for not doing so; then he said: "I'd

As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them, not only because they were untrue there being no

prospect of his receiving cash payment from Hale but also because he knew from experience the

imprudence of letting Zeena think he was in funds on the eve of one of her therapeutic excursions. At the

moment, however, his one desire was to avoid the long drive with her behind the ancient sorrel who never

Zeena made no reply: she did not seem to hear what he had said. She had already pushed her plate aside, and

"It ain't done me a speck of good, but I guess I might as well use it up," she remarked; adding, as she pushed

the empty bottle toward Mattie: "If you can get the taste out it'll do for pickles."

AS SOON as his wife had driven off Ethan took his coat and cap from the peg. Mattie was washing up the

dishes, humming one of the dance tunes of the night before. He said "So long, Matt," and she answered gaily

"So long, Ethan"; and that was all. It was warm and bright in the kitchen. The sun slanted through the south

window on the girl's moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on the geraniums brought in from the

doorway, where Ethan had planted them in the summer to "make a garden" for Mattie. He would have liked

to linger on, watching her tidy up and then settle down to her sewing; but he wanted still more to get the

All the way down to the village he continued to think of his return to Mattie. The kitchen was a poor place,

not "spruce" and shining as his mother had kept it in his boyhood; but it was surprising what a homelike look

the mere fact of Zeena's absence gave it. And he pictured what it would be like that evening, when he and

Mattie were there after supper. For the first time they would be alone together indoors, and they would sit

there, one on each side of the stove, like a married couple, he in his stocking feet and smoking his pipe, she

laughing and talking in that funny way she had, which was always as new to him as if he had never heard her

The sweetness of the picture, and the relief of knowing that his fears of "trouble" with Zeena were

unfounded, sent up his spirits with a rush, and he, who was usually so silent, whistled and sang aloud as he

drove through the snowy fields. There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield

winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in

others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse. At Worcester, though he had the name

of keeping to himself and not being much of a hand at a good time, he had secretly gloried in being clapped

on the back and hailed as "Old Ethe" or "Old Stiff"; and the cessation of such familiarities had increased the

There the silence had deepened about him year by year. Left alone, after his father's accident, to carry the

burden of farm and mill, he had had no time for convivial loiterings in the village; and when his mother fell

ill the loneliness of the house grew more oppressive than that of the fields. His mother had been a talker in

her day, but after her "trouble" the sound of her voice was seldom heard, though she had not lost the power of

speech. Sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when in desperation her son asked her why she didn't "say

something," she would lift a finger and answer: "Because I'm listening"; and on stormy nights, when the loud

wind was about the house, she would complain, if he spoke to her: "They're talking so out there that I can't

It was only when she drew toward her last illness, and his cousin Zenobia Pierce came over from the next

valley to help him nurse her, that human speech was heard again in the house. After the mortal silence of his

long imprisonment Zeena's volubility was music in his ears. He felt that he might have "gone like his mother"

if the sound of a new voice had not come to steady him. Zeena seemed to understand his case at a glance. She

laughed at him for not knowing the simplest sickbed duties and told him to "go right along out" and leave

her to see to things. The mere fact of obeying her orders, of feeling free to go about his business again and

talk with other men, restored his shaken balance and magnified his sense of what he owed her. Her efficiency

shamed and dazzled him. She seemed to possess by instinct all the household wisdom that his long

apprenticeship had not instilled in him. When the end came it was she who had to tell him to hitch up and go

for the undertaker, and she thought it "funny" that he had not settled beforehand who was to have his mother's

clothes and the sewingmachine. After the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized

with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had

asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother

When they married it was agreed that, as soon as he could straighten out the difficulties resulting from Mrs.

Frome's long illness, they would sell the farm and sawmill and try their luck in a large town. Ethan's love of

nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in

towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things." A slight engineering job in

Florida, put in his way during his period of study at Worcester, increased his faith in his ability as well as his

eagerness to see the world; and he felt sure that, with a "smart" wife like Zeena, it would not be long before

Zeena's native village was slightly larger and nearer to the railway than Starkfield, and she had let her

husband see from the first that life on an isolated farm was not what she had expected when she married. But

purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of

transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked

down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the

greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of

their marriage she developed the "sickliness" which had since made her notable even in a community rich in

pathological instances. When she came to take care of his mother she had seemed to Ethan like the very

genius of health, but he soon saw that her skill as a nurse had been acquired by the absorbed observation of

Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes

said, it was because Ethan "never listened." The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was

only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient

retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she

talked. Of late, however, since he had reasons for observing her more closely, her silence had begun to

trouble him. He recalled his mother's growing taciturnity, and wondered if Zeena were also turning "queer."

Women did, he knew. Zeena, who had at her fingers' ends the pathological chart of the whole region, had

cited many cases of the kind while she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of certain lonely

farmhouses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined, and of others where sudden tragedy had

come of their presence. At times, looking at Zeena's shut face, he felt the chill of such forebodings. At other

times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal farreaching intentions, mysterious conclusions

drawn from suspicions and resentments impossible to guess. That supposition was even more disturbing than

the other; and it was the one which had come to him the night before, when he had seen her standing in the

Now her departure for Bettsbridge had once more eased his mind, and all his thoughts were on the prospect

of his evening with Mattie. Only one thing weighed on him, and that was his having told Zeena that he was to

receive cash for the lumber. He foresaw so clearly the consequences of this imprudence that with

considerable reluctance he decided to ask Andrew Hale for a small advance on his load.

When Ethan drove into Hale's yard the builder was just getting out of his sleigh.

Andrew Hale was a ruddy man with a big gray moustache and a stubbly doublechin unconstrained by a

collar; but his scrupulously clean shirt was always fastened by a small diamond stud. This display of

opulence was misleading, for though he did a fairly good business it was known that his easygoing habits and

the demands of his large family frequently kept him what Starkfield called "behind." He was an old friend of

Ethan's family, and his house one of the few to which Zeena occasionally went, drawn there by the fact that

Mrs. Hale, in her youth, had done more "doctoring" than any other woman in Starkfield, and was still a

Ethan set about unloading the logs and when he had finished his job he pushed open the glazed door of the

shed which the builder used as his office. Hale sat with his feet up on the stove, his back propped against a

battered desk strewn with papers: the place, like the man, was warm, genial and untidy.

The latter did not know how to begin, but at length he managed to bring out his request for an advance of

fifty dollars. The blood rushed to his thin skin under the sting of Hale's astonishment. It was the builder's

custom to pay at the end of three months, and there was no precedent between the two men for a cash

Ethan felt that if he had pleaded an urgent need Hale might have made shift to pay him; but pride, and an

instinctive prudence, kept him from resorting to this argument. After his father's death it had taken time to get

his head above water, and he did not want Andrew Hale, or any one else in Starkfield, to think he was going

under again. Besides, he hated lying; if he wanted the money he wanted it, and it was nobody's business to

ask why. He therefore made his demand with the awkwardness of a proud man who will not admit to himself

The builder refused genially, as he did everything else: he treated the matter as something in the nature of a

practical joke, and wanted to know if Ethan meditated buying a grand piano or adding a "cupolo" to his

Ethan's arts were soon exhausted, and after an embarrassed pause he wished Hale good day and opened the

door of the office. As he passed out the builder suddenly called after him: "See here you ain't in a tight

"Well, that's good! Because I am, a shade. Fact is, I was going to ask you to give me a little extra time on that

payment. Business is pretty slack, to begin with, and then I'm fixing up a little house for Ned and Ruth when

they're married. I'm glad to do it for 'em, but it costs." His look appealed to Ethan for sympathy. "The young

people like things nice. You know how it is yourself: it's not so long ago since you fixed up your own place

Ethan left the grays in Hale's stable and went about some other business in the village. As he walked away

the builder's last phrase lingered in his ears, and he reflected grimly that his seven years with Zeena seemed

The afternoon was drawing to an end, and here and there a lighted pane spangled the cold gray dusk and

made the snow look whiter. The bitter weather had driven every one indoors and Ethan had the long rural

street to himself. Suddenly he heard the brisk play of sleighbells and a cutter passed him, drawn by a

freegoing horse. Ethan recognised Michael Eady's roan colt, and young Denis Eady, in a handsome new fur

cap, leaned forward and waved a greeting. "Hello, Ethe!" he shouted and spun on.

The cutter was going in the direction of the Frome farm, and Ethan's heart contracted as he listened to the

dwindling bells. What more likely than that Denis Eady had heard of Zeena's departure for Bettsbridge, and

was profiting by the opportunity to spend an hour with Mattie? Ethan was ashamed of the storm of jealousy

in his breast. It seemed unworthy of the girl that his thoughts of her should be so violent.

He walked on to the church corner and entered the shade of the Varnum spruces, where he had stood with her

the night before. As he passed into their gloom he saw an indistinct outline just ahead of him. At his approach

it melted for an instant into two separate shapes and then conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a

halflaughing "Oh!" provoked by the discovery of his presence. Again the outline hastily disunited and the

Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead of him. Ethan smiled at the discomfiture

he had caused. What did it matter to Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum if they were caught kissing each other?

Everybody in Starkfield knew they were engaged. It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the

spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the

He fetched the grays from Hale's stable and started on his long climb back to the farm. The cold was less

sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star

pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push over the ridge

behind the farm, burn a goldedged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace

hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long

Ethan's ears were alert for the jingle of sleighbells, but not a sound broke the silence of the lonely road. As

he drew near the farm he saw, through the thin screen of larches at the gate, a light twinkling in the house

above him. "She's up in her room," he said to himself, "fixing herself up for supper"; and he remembered

Zeena's sarcastic stare when Mattie, on the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with smoothed

He passed by the graves on the knoll and turned his head to glance at one of the older headstones, which had

He used to think that fifty years sounded like a long time to live together, but now it seemed to him that they

might pass in a flash. Then, with a sudden dart of irony, he wondered if, when their turn came, the same

He opened the barndoor and craned his head into the obscurity, halffearing to discover Denis Eady's roan

colt in the stall beside the sorrel. But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with toothless jaws,

and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their

mangers. His was not a tuneful throat but harsh melodies burst from it as he locked the barn and sprang up

the hill to the house. He reached the kitchenporch and turned the doorhandle; but the door did not yield to

Startled at finding it locked he rattled the handle violently; then he reflected that Mattie was alone and that it

was natural she should barricade herself at nightfall. He stood in the darkness expecting to hear her step. It

did not come, and after vainly straining his ears he called out in a voice that shook with joy: "Hello, Matt!"

Silence answered; but in a minute or two he caught a sound on the stairs and saw a line of light about the

doorframe, as he had seen it the night before. So strange was the precision with which the incidents of the

previous evening were repeating themselves that he half expected, when he heard the key turn, to see his wife

She stood just as Zeena had stood, a lifted lamp in her hand, against the black background of the kitchen. She

held the light at the same level, and it drew out with the same distinctness her slim young throat and the

brown wrist no bigger than a child's. Then, striking upward, it threw a lustrous fleck on her lips, edged her

eyes with velvet shade, and laid a milky whiteness above the black curve of her brows.

She wore her usual dress of darkish stuff, and there was no bow at her neck; but through her hair she had run

a streak of crimson ribbon. This tribute to the unusual transformed and glorified her. She seemed to Ethan

taller, fuller, more womanly in shape and motion. She stood aside, smiling silently, while he entered, and

then moved away from him with something soft and flowing in her gait. She set the lamp on the table, and he

saw that it was carefully laid for supper, with fresh doughnuts, stewed blueberries and his favourite pickles in

a dish of gay red glass. A bright fire glowed in the stove and the cat lay stretched before it, watching the table

Ethan was suffocated with the sense of wellbeing. He went out into the passage to hang up his coat and pull

off his wet boots. When he came back Mattie had set the teapot on the table and the cat was rubbing itself

"Why, Puss! I nearly tripped over you," she cried, the laughter sparkling through her lashes.

Again Ethan felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. Could it be his coming that gave her such a kindled face?

"Well, Matt, any visitors?" he threw off, stooping down carelessly to examine the fastening of the stove.

She nodded and laughed "Yes, one," and he felt a blackness settling on his brows.

"Who was that?" he questioned, raising himself up to slant a glance at her beneath his scowl.

Her eyes danced with malice. "Why, Jotham Powell. He came in after he got back, and asked for a drop of

The blackness lifted and light flooded Ethan's brain. "That all? Well, I hope you made out to let him have it."

And after a pause he felt it right to add: "I suppose he got Zeena over to the Flats all right?"

The name threw a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking sideways at each other before Mattie

They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden, jumped between them into Zeena's empty chair.

Ethan, a moment earlier, had felt himself on the brink of eloquence; but the mention of Zeena had paralysed

him. Mattie seemed to feel the contagion of his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her tea,

while he feigned an insatiable appetite for doughnuts and sweet pickles. At last, after casting about for an

effective opening, he took a long gulp of tea, cleared his throat, and said: "Looks as if there'd be more snow."

She feigned great interest. "Is that so? Do you suppose it'll interfere with Zeena's getting back?" She flushed

Ethan reached over for another helping of pickles. "You never can tell, this time of year, it drifts so bad on

the Flats." The name had benumbed him again, and once more he felt as if Zeena were in the room between

The cat, unnoticed, had crept up on muffled paws from Zeena's seat to the table, and was stealthily elongating

its body in the direction of the milkjug, which stood between Ethan and Mattie. The two leaned forward at

the same moment and their hands met on the handle of the jug. Mattie's hand was underneath, and Ethan kept

his clasped on it a moment longer than was necessary. The cat, profiting by this unusual demonstration, tried

to effect an unnoticed retreat, and in doing so backed into the pickledish, which fell to the floor with a crash.

Mattie, in an instant, had sprung from her chair and was down on her knees by the fragments.

But this time his courage was up. "Well, she'll have to say it to the cat, any way!" he rejoined with a laugh,

She lifted stricken eyes to him. "Yes, but, you see, she never meant it should be used, not even when there

was company; and I had to get up on the stepladder to reach it down from the top shelf of the chinacloset,

where she keeps it with all her best things, and of course she'll want to know why I did it"

"She needn't know anything about it if you keep quiet. I'll get another just like it tomorrow. Where did it

"Oh, you'll never get another even there! It was a wedding present don't you remember? It came all the way

from Philadelphia, from Zeena's aunt that married the minister. That's why she wouldn't ever use it. Oh,

She began to cry, and he felt as if every one of her tears were pouring over him like burning lead. "Don't,

She struggled to her feet, and he rose and followed her helplessly while she spread out the pieces of glass on

the kitchen dresser. It seemed to him as if the shattered fragments of their evening lay there.

She drew aside, instinctively obeying his tone. "Oh, Ethan, what are you going to do?"

Without replying he gathered the pieces of glass into his broad palm and walked out of the kitchen to the

passage. There he lit a candleend, opened the chinacloset, and, reaching his long arm up to the highest

shelf, laid the pieces together with such accuracy of touch that a close inspection convinced him of the

impossibility of detecting from below that the dish was broken. If he glued it together the next morning

months might elapse before his wife noticed what had happened, and meanwhile he might after all be able to

match the dish at Shadd's Falls or Bettsbridge. Having satisfied himself that there was no risk of immediate

discovery he went back to the kitchen with a lighter step, and found Mattie disconsolately removing the last

Completely reassured, she shone on him through tearhung lashes, and his soul swelled with pride as he saw

how his tone subdued her. She did not even ask what he had done. Except when he was steering a big log

down the mountain to his mill he had never known such a thrilling sense of mastery.

THEY FINISHED supper, and while Mattie cleared the table Ethan went to look at the cows and then took a

last turn about the house. The earth lay dark under a muffled sky and the air was so still that now and then he

heard a lump of snow come thumping down from a tree far off on the edge of the woodlot. When he

returned to the kitchen Mattie had pushed up his chair to the stove and seated herself near the lamp with a bit

of sewing. The scene was just as he had dreamed of it that morning. He sat down, drew his pipe from his

pocket and stretched his feet to the glow. His hard day's work in the keen air made him feel at once lazy and

light of mood, and he had a confused sense of being in another world, where all was warmth and harmony

and time could bring no change. The only drawback to his complete wellbeing was the fact that he could not

see Mattie from where he sat; but he was too indolent to move and after a moment he said: "Come over here

Zeena's empty rockingchair stood facing him. Mattie rose obediently, and seated herself in it. As her young

brown head detached itself against the patchwork cushion that habitually framed his wife's gaunt

countenance, Ethan had a momentary shock. It was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded

woman, had obliterated that of the intruder. After a moment Mattie seemed to be affected by the same sense

of constraint. She changed her position, leaning forward to bend her head above her work, so that he saw only

the foreshortened tip of her nose and the streak of red in her hair; then she slipped to her feet, saying "I can't

Ethan made a pretext of getting up to replenish the stove, and when he returned to his seat he pushed it

sideways that he might get a view of her profile and of the lamplight falling on her hands. The cat, who had

been a puzzled observer of these unusual movements, jumped up into Zeena's chair, rolled itself into a ball,

Deep quiet sank on the room. The clock ticked above the dresser, a piece of charred wood fell now and then

in the stove, and the faint sharp scent of the geraniums mingled with the odour of Ethan's smoke, which

began to throw a blue haze about the lamp and to hang its greyish cobwebs in the shadowy corners of the

All constraint had vanished between the two, and they began to talk easily and simply. They spoke of

everyday things, of the prospect of snow, of the next church sociable, of the loves and quarrels of Starkfield.

The commonplace nature of what they said produced in Ethan an illusion of longestablished intimacy which

no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always

"This is the night we were to have gone coasting. Matt," he said at length, with the rich sense, as he spoke,

that they could go on any other night they chose, since they had all time before them.

"No, I didn't forget; but it's as dark as Egypt outdoors. We might go tomorrow if there's a moon."

She laughed with pleasure, her head tilted back, the lamplight sparkling on her lips and teeth. "That would be

He kept his eyes fixed on her, marvelling at the way her face changed with each turn of their talk, like a

wheatfield under a summer breeze. It was intoxicating to find such magic in his clumsy words, and he

"Would you be scared to go down the Corbury road with me on a night like this?" he asked.

"Well, I'd be scared, then; I wouldn't do it. That's an ugly corner down by the big elm. If a fellow didn't keep

his eyes open he'd go plumb into it." He luxuriated in the sense of protection and authority which his words

conveyed. To prolong and intensify the feeling he added: "I guess we're well enough here."

She let her lids sink slowly, in the way he loved. "Yes, we're well enough here," she sighed.

Her tone was so sweet that he took the pipe from his mouth and drew his chair up to the table. Leaning

forward, he touched the farther end of the strip of brown stuff that she was hemming. "Say, Matt," he began

with a smile, "what do you think I saw under the Varnum spruces, coming along home just now? I saw a

The words had been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had spoken them they struck him as

Mattie blushed to the roots of her hair and pulled her needle rapidly twice or thrice through her work,

insensibly drawing the end of it away from him. "I suppose it was Ruth and Ned," she said in a low voice, as

Ethan had imagined that his allusion might open the way to the accepted pleasantries, and these perhaps in

turn to a harmless caress, if only a mere touch on her hand. But now he felt as if her blush had set a flaming

guard about her. He supposed it was his natural awkwardness that made him feel so. He knew that most

young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a kiss, and he remembered that the night before, when

he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had been outofdoors, under the open

irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order,

To ease his constraint he said: "I suppose they'll be setting a date before long."

"Yes. I shouldn't wonder if they got married some time along in the summer." She pronounced the word

married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades. A pang shot

through Ethan, and he said, twisting away from her in his chair: "It'll be your turn next, I wouldn't wonder."

He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped lashes, while he sat in fascinated

contemplation of the way in which her hands went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen a

pair of birds make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were building. At length, without turning her

head or lifting her lids, she said in a low tone: "It's not because you think Zeena's got anything against me, is

His former dread started up fullarmed at the suggestion. "Why, what do you mean?" he stammered.

She raised distressed eyes to his, her work dropping on the table between them. "I don't know. I thought last

"Nobody can tell with Zeena." It was the first time they had ever spoken so openly of her attitude toward

Mattie, and the repetition of the name seemed to carry it to the farther corners of the room and send it back to

them in long repercussions of sound. Mattie waited, as if to give the echo time to drop, and then went on:

She tossed the hair back from her forehead with a laugh. "I guess I'm just nervous, then. I'm not going to

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 palmdownward along the table till his fingertips 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

countercurrent 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

"She'll be rocking in it herself this time tomorrow," 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

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

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

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 soapbox 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

When these nightly duties were performed there was nothing left to do but to bring in the tin candlestick from

the passage, light the candle and blow out the lamp. Ethan put the candlestick in Mattie's hand and she went

out of the kitchen ahead of him, the light that she carried before her making her dark hair look like a drift of

"Good night, Matt," he said as she put her foot on the first step of the stairs.

She turned and looked at him a moment. "Good night, Ethan," she answered, and went up.

When the door of her room had closed on her he remembered that he had not even touched her hand.

THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan tried to hide his joy under

an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging back in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the

weather, and not so much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away the dishes. He did not know

why he was so irrationally happy, for nothing was changed in his life or hers. He had not even touched the tip

of her fingers or looked her full in the eyes. But their evening together had given him a vision of what life at

her side might be, and he was glad now that he had done nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture. He

There was a last load of lumber to be hauled to the village, and Jotham Powell who did not work regularly

for Ethan in winter had "come round" to help with the job. But a wet snow, melting to sleet, had fallen in the

night and turned the roads to glass. There was more wet in the air and it seemed likely to both men that the

weather would "milden" toward afternoon and make the going safer. Ethan therefore proposed to his assistant

that they should load the sledge at the woodlot, as they had done on the previous morning, and put off the

"teaming" to Starkfield till later in the day. This plan had the advantage of enabling him to send Jotham to the

Flats after dinner to meet Zenobia, while he himself took the lumber down to the village.

He told Jotham to go out and harness up the greys, and for a moment he and Mattie had the kitchen to

themselves. She had plunged the breakfast dishes into a tin dishpan and was bending above it with her slim

arms bared to the elbow, the steam from the hot water beading her forehead and tightening her rough hair into

Ethan stood looking at her, his heart in his throat. He wanted to say: "We shall never be alone again like this."

Instead, he reached down his tobaccopouch from a shelf of the dresser, put it into his pocket and said: "I

She answered "All right, Ethan," and he heard her singing over the dishes as he went.

As soon as the sledge was loaded he meant to send Jotham back to the farm and hurry on foot into the village

to buy the glue for the pickledish. With ordinary luck he should have had time to carry out this plan; but

everything went wrong from the start. On the way over to the woodlot one of the greys slipped on a glare of

ice and cut his knee; and when they got him up again Jotham had to go back to the barn for a strip of rag to

bind the cut. Then, when the loading finally began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and the tree

trunks were so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift them and get them in place on the sledge. It

was what Jotham called a sour morning for work, and the horses, shivering and stamping under their wet

blankets, seemed to like it as little as the men. It was long past the dinnerhour when the job was done, and

Ethan had to give up going to the village because he wanted to lead the injured horse home and wash the cut

He thought that by starting out again with the lumber as soon as he had finished his dinner he might get back

to the farm with the glue before Jotham and the old sorrel had had time to fetch Zenobia from the Flats; but

he knew the chance was a slight one. It turned on the state of the roads and on the possible lateness of the

Bettsbridge train. He remembered afterward, with a grim flash of selfderision, what importance he had

As soon as dinner was over he set out again for the woodlot, not daring to linger till Jotham Powell left. The

hired man was still drying his wet feet at the stove, and Ethan could only give Mattie a quick look as he said

He fancied that she nodded her comprehension; and with that scant solace he had to trudge off through the

He had driven his load halfway to the village when Jotham Powell overtook him, urging the reluctant sorrel

toward the Flats. "I'll have to hurry up to do it," Ethan mused, as the sleigh dropped down ahead of him over

the dip of the schoolhouse hill. He worked like ten at the unloading, and when it was over hastened on to

Michael Eady's for the glue. Eady and his assistant were both "down street," and young Denis, who seldom

deigned to take their place, was lounging by the stove with a knot of the golden youth of Starkfield. They

hailed Ethan with ironic compliment and offers of conviviality; but no one knew where to find the glue.

Ethan, consumed with the longing for a last moment alone with Mattie, hung about impatiently while Denis

"Looks as if we were all sold out. But if you'll wait around till the old man comes along maybe he can put his

"I'm obliged to you, but I'll try if I can get it down at Mrs. Homan's," Ethan answered, burning to be gone.

Denis's commercial instinct compelled him to aver on oath that what Eady's store could not produce would

never be found at the widow Homan's; but Ethan, heedless of this boast, had already climbed to the sledge

and was driving on to the rival establishment. Here, after considerable search, and sympathetic questions as to

what he wanted it for, and whether ordinary flour paste wouldn't do as well if she couldn't find it, the widow

Homan finally hunted down her solitary bottle of glue to its hidingplace in a medley of coughlozenges and

"I hope Zeena ain't broken anything she sets store by," she called after him as he turned the greys toward

The fitful bursts of sleet had changed into a steady rain and the horses had heavy work even without a load

behind them. Once or twice, hearing sleighbells, Ethan turned his head, fancying that Zeena and Jotham

might overtake him; but the old sorrel was not in sight, and he set his face against the rain and urged on his

The barn was empty when the horses turned into it and, after giving them the most perfunctory ministrations

they had ever received from him, he strode up to the house and pushed open the kitchen door.

Mattie was there alone, as he had pictured her. She was bending over a pan on the stove; but at the sound of

"See, here, Matt, I've got some stuff to mend the dish with! Let me get at it quick," he cried, waving the bottle

"Jotham Powell brought some goods over from the Flats for his wife, and he drove right on home with them,"

He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the rainy winter twilight.

She looked away from him uncertainly. "I don't know. She went right up to her room."

Ethan let out his doubts in a low whistle and thrust the bottle back into his pocket. "Don't fret; I'll come down

and mend it in the night," he said. He pulled on his wet coat again and went back to the barn to feed the

While he was there Jotham Powell drove up with the sleigh, and when the horses had been attended to Ethan

said to him: "You might as well come back up for a bite." He was not sorry to assure himself of Jotham's

neutralising presence at the supper table, for Zeena was always "nervous" after a journey. But the hired man,

though seldom loth to accept a meal not included in his wages, opened his stiff jaws to answer slowly: "I'm

Ethan looked at him in surprise. "Better come up and dry off. Looks as if there'd be something hot for

Jotham's facial muscles were unmoved by this appeal and, his vocabulary being limited, he merely repeated:

To Ethan there was something vaguely ominous in this stolid rejection of free food and warmth, and he

wondered what had happened on the drive to nerve Jotham to such stoicism. Perhaps Zeena had failed to see

the new doctor or had not liked his counsels: Ethan knew that in such cases the first person she met was likely

When he reentered the kitchen the lamp lit up the same scene of shining comfort as on the previous evening.

The table had been as carefully laid, a clear fire glowed in the stove, the cat dozed in its warmth, and Mattie

She and Ethan looked at each other in silence; then she said, as she had said the night before: "I guess it's

ETHAN WENT OUT into the passage to hang up his wet garments. He listened for Zeena's step and, not

hearing it, called her name up the stairs. She did not answer, and after a moment's hesitation he went up and

opened her door. The room was almost dark, but in the obscurity he saw her sitting by the window, bolt

upright, and knew by the rigidity of the outline projected against the pane that she had not taken off her

It was the consecrated formula, and he expected it to be followed, as usual, by her rising and going down to

supper. But she remained seated, and he could think of nothing more felicitous than: "I presume you're tired

Turning her head at this, she answered solemnly: "I'm a great deal sicker than you think."

Her words fell on his ear with a strange shock of wonder. He had often heard her pronounce them before

He advanced a step or two into the dim room. "I hope that's not so, Zeena," he said.

She continued to gaze at him through the twilight with a mien of wan authority, as of one consciously singled

Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had "troubles,"

frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had "complications." To have them was in itself a

distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a deathwarrant. People struggled on for years with "troubles,"

Ethan's heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion

prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.

"Is that what the new doctor told you?" he asked, instinctively lowering his voice.

Ethan was aware that, in regard to the important question of surgical intervention, the female opinion of the

neighbourhood was divided, some glorying in the prestige conferred by operations while others shunned them

as indelicate. Ethan, from motives of economy, had always been glad that Zeena was of the latter faction.

In the agitation caused by the gravity of her announcement he sought a consolatory short cut. "What do you

He saw his blunder before she could take it up: she wanted sympathy, not consolation.

"I didn't need to have anybody tell me I was losing ground every day. Everybody but you could see it. And

everybody in Bettsbridge knows about Dr. Buck. He has his office in Worcester, and comes over once a

fortnight to Shadd's Falls and Bettsbridge for consultations. Eliza Spears was wasting away with kidney

trouble before she went to him, and now she's up and around, and singing in the choir."

"Well, I'm glad of that. You must do just what he tells you," Ethan answered sympathetically.

She was still looking at him. "I mean to," she said. He was struck by a new note in her voice. It was neither

"What does he want you should do?" he asked, with a mounting vision of fresh expenses.

"He wants I should have a hired girl. He says I oughtn't to have to do a single thing around the house."

"Yes. And Aunt Martha found me one right off. Everybody said I was lucky to get a girl to come away out

here, and I agreed to give her a dollar extry to make sure. She'll be over tomorrow afternoon."

Wrath and dismay contended in Ethan. He had foreseen an immediate demand for money, but not a

permanent drain on his scant resources. He no longer believed what Zeena had told him of the supposed

seriousness of her state: he saw in her expedition to Bettsbridge only a plot hatched between herself and her

Pierce relations to foist on him the cost of a servant; and for the moment wrath predominated.

"If you meant to engage a girl you ought to have told me before you started," he said.

"How could I tell you before I started? How did I know what Dr. Buck would say?"

"Oh, Dr. Buck" Ethan's incredulity escaped in a short laugh. "Did Dr. Buck tell you how I was to pay her

Her voice rose furiously with his. "No, he didn't. For I'd 'a' been ashamed to tell him that you grudged me the

"Yes; and my folks all told me at the time you couldn't do no less than marry me after"

Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart at each other like serpents shooting

venom. Ethan was seized with horror of the scene and shame at his own share in it. It was as senseless and

He turned to the shelf above the chimney, groped for matches and lit the one candle in the room. At first its

weak flame made no impression on the shadows; then Zeena's face stood grimly out against the uncurtained

It was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years together, and Ethan felt as if

he had lost an irretrievable advantage in descending to the level of recrimination. But the practical problem

"You know I haven't got the money to pay for a girl, Zeena. You'll have to send her back: I can't do it."

"The doctor says it'll be my death if I go on slaving the way I've had to. He doesn't understand how I've stood

"Slaving!" He checked himself again, "You sha'n't lift a hand, if he says so. I'll do everything round the

She broke in: "You're neglecting the farm enough already," and this being true, he found no answer, and left

her time to add ironically: "Better send me over to the almshouse and done with it... I guess there's been

The taunt burned into him, but he let it pass. "I haven't got the money. That settles it."

There was a moment's pause in the struggle, as though the combatants were testing their weapons. Then

Zeena said in a level voice: "I thought you were to get fifty dollars from Andrew Hale for that lumber."

"Andrew Hale never pays under three months." He had hardly spoken when he remembered the excuse he

had made for not accompanying his wife to the station the day before; and the blood rose to his frowning

"Why, you told me yesterday you'd fixed it up with him to pay cash down. You said that was why you

Ethan had no suppleness in deceiving. He had never before been convicted of a lie, and all the resources of

"No." He paused to control his voice. "But you know it now. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. You're a poor

For a while she sat motionless, as if reflecting, her arms stretched along the arms of her chair, her eyes fixed

The change in her tone reassured him. "Of course we will! There's a whole lot more I can do for you, and

Zeena, while he spoke, seemed to be following out some elaborate mental calculation. She emerged from it to

Ethan, supposing the discussion to be over, had turned to go down to supper. He stopped short, not grasping

Zeena laughed. It was on odd unfamiliar sound he did not remember ever having heard her laugh before.

"You didn't suppose I was going to keep two girls, did you? No wonder you were scared at the expense!"

He still had but a confused sense of what she was saying. From the beginning of the discussion he had

instinctively avoided the mention of Mattie's name, fearing he hardly knew what: criticism, complaints, or

vague allusions to the imminent probability of her marrying. But the thought of a definite rupture had never

"I don't know what you mean," he said. "Mattie Silver's not a hired girl. She's your relation."

"She's a pauper that's hung onto us all after her father'd done his best to ruin us. I've kep' her here a whole

As the shrill words shot out Ethan heard a tap on the door, which he had drawn shut when he turned back

"EthanZeena!" Mattie's voice sounded gaily from the landing, "do you know what time it is? Supper's been

Inside the room there was a moment's silence; then Zeena called out from her seat: "I'm not coming down to

Ethan roused himself with an effort and opened the door. "Go along down, Matt. Zeena's just a little tired. I'm

He heard her "All right!" and her quick step on the stairs; then he shut the door and turned back into the

room. His wife's attitude was unchanged, her face inexorable, and he was seized with the despairing sense of

He continued with rising vehemence: "You can't put her out of the house like a thief a poor girl without

friends or money. She's done her best for you and she's got no place to go to. You may forget she's your kin

but everybody else'll remember it. If you do a thing like that what do you suppose folks'll say of you?"

Zeena waited a moment, as if giving him time to feel the full force of the contrast between his own

excitement and her composure. Then she replied in the same smooth voice: "I know well enough what they

Ethan's hand dropped from the doorknob, which he had held clenched since he had drawn the door shut on

Mattie. His wife's retort was like a knifecut across the sinews and he felt suddenly weak and powerless. He

had meant to humble himself, to argue that Mattie's keep didn't cost much, after all, that he could make out to

buy a stove and fix up a place in the attic for the hired girl but Zeena's words revealed the peril of such

"You mean to tell her she's got to go at once?" he faltered out, in terror of letting his wife complete her

As if trying to make him see reason she replied impartially: "The girl will be over from Bettsbridge

Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state

of sullen selfabsorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of

silent brooding. It was the sense of his helplessness that sharpened his antipathy. There had never been

anything in her that one could appeal to; but as long as he could ignore and command he had remained

indifferent. Now she had mastered him and he abhorred her. Mattie was her relation, not his: there were no

means by which he could compel her to keep the girl under her roof. All the long misery of his baffled past,

of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape

before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and

now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others. For a moment such a flame of hate rose in

him that it ran down his arm and clenched his fist against her. He took a wild step forward and then stopped.

"No. I guess I'll lay down on the bed a little while," she answered mildly; and he turned and walked out of the

In the kitchen Mattie was sitting by the stove, the cat curled up on her knees. She sprang to her feet as Ethan

She shone at him across the table. "Well, sit right down then. You must be starving." She uncovered the pie

and pushed it over to him. So they were to have one more evening together, her happy eyes seemed to say!

He helped himself mechanically and began to eat; then disgust took him by the throat and he laid down his

"Yes it's firstrate. Only I" He pushed his plate away, rose from his chair, and walked around the table to

She seemed to melt against him in her terror, and he caught her in his arms, held her fast there, felt her lashes

"What is it what is it?" she stammered; but he had found her lips at last and was drinking unconsciousness

She lingered a moment, caught in the same strong current; then she slipped from him and drew back a step or

two, pale and troubled. Her look smote him with compunction, and he cried out, as if he saw her drowning in

The words went on sounding between them as though a torch of warning flew from hand to hand through a

Ethan was overcome with shame at his lack of selfcontrol in flinging the news at her so brutally. His head

reeled and he had to support himself against the table. All the while he felt as if he were still kissing her, and

Her cry steadied him, though it deepened his wrath and pity. "No, no," he assured her, "it's not that. But this

new doctor has scared her about herself. You know she believes all they say the first time she sees them. And

this one's told her she won't get well unless she lays up and don't do a thing about the house not for

He paused, his eyes wandering from her miserably. She stood silent a moment, drooping before him like a

broken branch. She was so small and weaklooking that it wrung his heart; but suddenly she lifted her head

and looked straight at him. "And she wants somebody handier in my place? Is that it?"

Both bowed to the inexorable truth: they knew that Zeena never changed her mind, and that in her case a

There was a long silence between them; then Mattie said in a low voice: "Don't be too sorry, Ethan."

"Oh, God oh, God," he groaned. The glow of passion he had felt for her had melted to an aching tenderness.

He saw her quick lids beating back the tears, and longed to take her in his arms and soothe her.

"You're letting your supper get cold," she admonished him with a pale gleam of gaiety.

Her lids sank and a tremor crossed her face. He saw that for the first time the thought of the future came to

her distinctly. "I might get something to do over at Stamford," she faltered, as if knowing that he knew she

He dropped back into his seat and hid his face in his hands. Despair seized him at the thought of her setting

out alone to renew the weary quest for work. In the only place where she was known she was surrounded by

indifference or animosity; and what chance had she, inexperienced and untrained, among the million

breadseekers of the cities? There came back to him miserable tales he had heard at Worcester, and the faces

of girls whose lives had begun as hopefully as Mattie's.... It was not possible to think of such things without a

"You can't go, Matt! I won't let you! She's always had her way, but I mean to have mine now"

Mattie lifted her hand with a quick gesture, and he heard his wife's step behind him.

Zeena came into the room with her dragging downattheheel step, and quietly took her accustomed seat

"I felt a little mite better, and Dr. Buck says I ought to eat all I can to keep my strength up, even if I ain't got

any appetite," she said in her flat whine, reaching across Mattie for the teapot. Her "good" dress had been

replaced by the black calico and brown knitted shawl which formed her daily wear, and with them she had

put on her usual face and manner. She poured out her tea, added a great deal of milk to it, helped herself

largely to pie and pickles, and made the familiar gesture of adjusting her false teeth before she began to eat.

The cat rubbed itself ingratiatingly against her, and she said "Good Pussy," stooped to stroke it and gave it a

Ethan sat speechless, not pretending to eat, but Mattie nibbled valiantly at her food and asked Zeena one or

two questions about her visit to Bettsbridge. Zeena answered in her everyday tone and, warming to the

theme, regaled them with several vivid descriptions of intestinal disturbances among her friends and relatives.

She looked straight at Mattie as she spoke, a faint smile deepening the vertical lines between her nose and

When supper was over she rose from her seat and pressed her hand to the flat surface over the region of her

heart. "That pie of yours always sets a mite heavy, Matt," she said, not illnaturedly. She seldom abbreviated

"I've a good mind to go and hunt up those stomach powders I got last year over in Springfield," she

continued. "I ain't tried them for quite a while, and maybe they'll help the heartburn."

"No. They're in a place you don't know about," Zeena answered darkly, with one of her secret looks.

She went out of the kitchen and Mattie, rising, began to clear the dishes from the table. As she passed Ethan's

chair their eyes met and clung together desolately. The warm still kitchen looked as peaceful as the night

before. The cat had sprung to Zeena's rockingchair, and the heat of the fire was beginning to draw out the

"I'll go out and take a look around," he said, going toward the passage to get his lantern.

As he reached the door he met Zeena coming back into the room, her lips twitching with anger, a flush of

excitement on her sallow face. The shawl had slipped from her shoulders and was dragging at her

downtrodden heels, and in her hands she carried the fragments of the red glass pickledish.

"I'd like to know who done this," she said, looking sternly from Ethan to Mattie.

There was no answer, and she continued in a trembling voice: "I went to get those powders I'd put away in

father's old spectaclecase, top of the chinacloset, where I keep the things I set store by, so's folks shan't

meddle with them" Her voice broke, and two small tears hung on her lashless lids and ran slowly down her

cheeks. "It takes the stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt Philura Maple's pickledish up there o'

purpose when we was married, and it's never been down since, 'cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always

lifted it with my own hands, so's 't shouldn't get broke." She laid the fragments reverently on the table. "I

At the challenge Ethan turned back into the room and faced her. "I can tell you, then. The cat done it."

She looked at him hard, and then turned her eyes to Mattie, who was carrying the dishpan to the table.

"Chasin' mice, I guess," Ethan rejoined. "There was a mouse round the kitchen all last evening."

Zeena continued to look from one to the other; then she emitted her small strange laugh. "I knew the cat was

a smart cat," she said in a high voice, "but I didn't know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces of my

Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. "It wasn't Ethan's fault, Zeena! The cat did break

the dish; but I got it down from the chinacloset, and I'm the one to blame for its getting broken."

Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony image of resentment, "You got down my

A bright flush flew to Mattie's cheeks. "I wanted to make the suppertable pretty," she said.

"You wanted to make the suppertable pretty; and you waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I

set most store by of anything I've got, and wouldn't never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner,

or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge" Zeena paused with a gasp, as if terrified by her own

evocation of the sacrilege. "You're a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It's the way your father

begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn't get at 'em

and now you've took from me the one I cared for most of all" She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that

"If I'd 'a' listened to folks, you'd 'a' gone before now, and this wouldn't 'a' happened," she said; and gathering

up the bits of broken glass she went out of the room as if she carried a dead body...

WHEN ETHAN was called back to the farm by his father's illness his mother gave him, for his own use, a

small room behind the untenanted "best parlour." Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built himself a

boxsofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on a kitchentable, hung on the rough plaster wall

an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a calendar with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with these

meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a "minister" who had been kind to him and lent

him books when he was at Worcester. He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at

the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several months of the

year. To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena's steady breathing from the bed

had assured him that there was to be no sequel to the scene in the kitchen. After Zeena's departure he and

Mattie had stood speechless, neither seeking to approach the other. Then the girl had returned to her task of

clearing up the kitchen for the night and he had taken his lantern and gone on his usual round outside the

house. The kitchen was empty when he came back to it; but his tobaccopouch and pipe had been laid on the

table, and under them was a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman's catalogue, on which three

Going into his cold dark "study" he placed the lantern on the table and, stooping to its light, read the message

again and again. It was the first time that Mattie had ever written to him, and the possession of the paper gave

him a strange new sense of her nearness; yet it deepened his anguish by reminding him that henceforth they

would have no other way of communicating with each other. For the life of her smile, the warmth of her

Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to

submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous

woman? Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena's

narrowmindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it? She was a hundred times bitterer and

more discontented than when he had married her: the one pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the

He bundled himself into his old coonskin coat and lay down on the boxsofa to think. Under his cheek he

felt a hard object with strange protuberances. It was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when they

were engaged the only piece of needlework he had ever seen her do. He flung it across the floor and

He knew a case of a man over the mountain a young fellow of about his own age who had escaped from

just such a life of misery by going West with the girl he cared for. His wife had divorced him, and he had

married the girl and prospered. Ethan had seen the couple the summer before at Shadd's Falls, where they had

come to visit relatives. They had a little girl with fair curls, who wore a gold locket and was dressed like a

princess. The deserted wife had not done badly either. Her husband had given her the farm and she had

managed to sell it, and with that and the alimony she had started a lunchroom at Bettsbridge and bloomed

into activity and importance. Ethan was fired by the thought. Why should he not leave with Mattie the next

day, instead of letting her go alone? He would hide his valise under the seat of the sleigh, and Zeena would

suspect nothing till she went upstairs for her afternoon nap and found a letter on the bed...

His impulses were still near the surface, and he sprang up, relit the lantern, and sat down at the table. He

"Zeena, I've done all I could for you, and I don't see as it's been any use. I don't blame you, nor I don't blame

myself. Maybe both of us will do better separate. I'm going to try my luck West, and you can sell the farm

His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless conditions of his lot. If he gave the

farm and mill to Zeena what would be left him to start his own life with? Once in the West he was sure of

picking up work he would not have feared to try his chance alone. But with Mattie depending on him the

case was different. And what of Zeena's fate? Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and

even if she found a purchaser in itself an unlikely chance it was doubtful if she could clear a thousand

dollars on the sale. Meanwhile, how could she keep the farm going? It was only by incessant labour and

personal supervision that Ethan drew a meagre living from his land, and his wife, even if she were in better

Well, she could go back to her people, then, and see what they would do for her. It was the fate she was

forcing on Mattie why not let her try it herself? By the time she had discovered his whereabouts, and

brought suit for divorce, he would probably wherever he was be earning enough to pay her a sufficient

alimony. And the alternative was to let Mattie go forth alone, with far less hope of ultimate provision...

He had scattered the contents of the tabledrawer in his search for a sheet of paper, and as he took up his pen

his eye fell on an old copy of the Bettsbridge Eagle. The advertising sheet was folded uppermost, and he read

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 prisonwarders handcuffing a convict. There was no way out none. He was a prisoner for life,

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 windowpane that faced him, growing gradually lighter, inlaid upon the darkness a

square of moonsuffused sky. A crooked treebranch crossed it, a branch of the appletree 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 silveredged 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,"

She looked so small and pinched, in her poor dress, with the red scarf wound about her, and the cold light

"Because I heard you go down stairs again after I went to bed, and I listened all night, and you didn't come

All his tenderness rushed to his lips. He looked at her and said: "I'll come right along and make up the kitchen

They went back to the kitchen, and he fetched the coal and kindlings and cleared out the stove for her, while

she brought in the milk and the cold remains of the meatpie. When warmth began to radiate from the stove,

and the first ray of sunlight lay on the kitchen floor, Ethan's dark thoughts melted in the mellower air. The

sight of Mattie going about her work as he had seen her on so many mornings made it seem impossible that

she should ever cease to be a part of the scene. He said to himself that he had doubtless exaggerated the

significance of Zeena's threats, and that she too, with the return of daylight, would come to a saner mood.

He went up to Mattie as she bent above the stove, and laid his hand on her arm. "I don't want you should

She flushed up warmly and whispered back: "No, Ethan, I ain't going to trouble."

There was no answer but a quick throb of her lids, and he went on: "She ain't said anything this morning?"

With this injunction he left her and went out to the cowbarn. He saw Jotham Powell walking up the hill

through the morning mist, and the familiar sight added to his growing conviction of security.

As the two men were clearing out the stalls Jotham rested on his pitchfork to say: "Dan'l Byrne's goin' over

to the Flats today noon, an' he c'd take Mattie's trunk along, and make it easier ridin' when I take her over in

Ethan looked at him blankly, and he continued: "Mis' Frome said the new girl'd be at the Flats at five, and I

was to take Mattie then, so's 't she could ketch the six o'clock train for Stamford."

Ethan felt the blood drumming in his temples. He had to wait a moment before he could find voice to say:

When they returned to the kitchen the two women were already at breakfast. Zeena had an air of unusual

alertness and activity. She drank two cups of coffee and fed the cat with the scraps left in the piedish; then

she rose from her seat and, walking over to the window, snipped two or three yellow leaves from the

geraniums. "Aunt Martha's ain't got a faded leaf on 'em; but they pine away when they ain't cared for," she

said reflectively. Then she turned to Jotham and asked: "What time'd you say Dan'l Byrne'd be along?"

Zeena turned to Mattie. "That trunk of yours is too heavy for the sleigh, and Dan'l Byrne'll be round to take it

"I'd like to go over things with you first," Zeena continued in an unperturbed voice. "I know there's a

huckabuck towel missing; and I can't take out what you done with that matchsafe 't used to stand behind the

She went out, followed by Mattie, and when the men were alone Jotham said to his employer: "I guess I

Ethan finished his usual morning tasks about the house and barn; then he said to Jotham: "I'm going down to

The passion of rebellion had broken out in him again. That which had seemed incredible in the sober light of

day had really come to pass, and he was to assist as a helpless spectator at Mattie's banishment. His manhood

was humbled by the part he was compelled to play and by the thought of what Mattie must think of him.

Confused impulses struggled in him as he strode along to the village. He had made up his mind to do

The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when

the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring. Every yard of the road was alive with Mattie's

presence, and there was hardly a branch against the sky or a tangle of brambles on the bank in which some

bright shred of memory was not caught. Once, in the stillness, the call of a bird in a mountain ash was so like

her laughter that his heart tightened and then grew large; and all these things made him see that something

Suddenly it occurred to him that Andrew Hale, who was a kindhearted man, might be induced to reconsider

his refusal and advance a small sum on the lumber if he were told that Zeena's illhealth made it necessary to

hire a servant. Hale, after all, knew enough of Ethan's situation to make it possible for the latter to renew his

appeal without too much loss of pride; and, moreover, how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions

The more he considered his plan the more hopeful it seemed. If he could get Mrs. Hale's ear he felt certain of

success, and with fifty dollars in his pocket nothing could keep him from Mattie...

His first object was to reach Starkfield before Hale had started for his work; he knew the carpenter had a job

down the Corbury road and was likely to leave his house early. Ethan's long strides grew more rapid with the

accelerated beat of his thoughts, and as he reached the foot of School House Hill he caught sight of Hale's

sleigh in the distance. He hurried forward to meet it, but as it drew nearer he saw that it was driven by the

carpenter's youngest boy and that the figure at his side, looking like a large upright cocoon in spectacles, was

that of Mrs. Hale. Ethan signed to them to stop, and Mrs. Hale leaned forward, her pink wrinkles twinkling

"Mr. Hale? Why, yes, you'll find him down home now. He ain't going to his work this forenoon. He woke up

with a touch o' lumbago, and I just made him put on one of old Dr. Kidder's plasters and set right up into the

Beaming maternally on Ethan, she bent over to add: "I on'y just heard from Mr. Hale 'bout Zeena's going over

to Bettsbridge to see that new doctor. I'm real sorry she's feeling so bad again! I hope he thinks he can do

something for her. I don't know anybody round here's had more sickness than Zeena. I always tell Mr. Hale I

don't know what she'd 'a' done if she hadn't 'a' had you to look after her; and I used to say the same thing 'bout

She gave him a last nod of sympathy while her son chirped to the horse; and Ethan, as she drove off, stood in

It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs. Hale. Most people were either

indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried

without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs. Hale had said, "You've had an awful mean time,

Ethan Frome," and he felt less alone with his misery. If the Hales were sorry for him they would surely

He started down the road toward their house, but at the end of a few yards he pulled up sharply, the blood in

his face. For the first time, in the light of the words he had just heard, he saw what he was about to do. He

was planning to take advantage of the Hales' sympathy to obtain money from them on false pretences. That

was a plain statement of the cloudy purpose which had driven him in headlong to Starkfield.

With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw

his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would

leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by

AT THE KITCHEN DOOR Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a bigboned grey who pawed the snow and

swung his long head restlessly from side to side. Ethan went into the kitchen and found his wife by the stove.

Her head was wrapped in her shawl, and she was reading a book called "Kidney Troubles and Their Cure" on

Zeena did not move or look up when he entered, and after a moment he asked: "Where's Mattie?"

Without lifting her eyes from the page she replied: "I presume she's getting down her trunk."

"Jotham Powell's down in the woodlot, and Dan'l Byrne says he darsn't leave that horse," she returned.

Her husband, without stopping to hear the end of the phrase, had left the kitchen and sprung up the stairs. The

door of Mattie's room was shut, and he wavered a moment on the landing. "Matt," he said in a low voice; but

He had never been in her room except once, in the early summer, when he had gone there to plaster up a leak

in the eaves, but he remembered exactly how everything had looked: the redandwhite quilt on her narrow

bed, the pretty pincushion on the chest of drawers, and over it the enlarged photograph of her mother, in an

oxydized frame, with a bunch of dyed grasses at the back. Now these and all other tokens of her presence had

vanished and the room looked as bare and comfortless as when Zeena had shown her into it on the day of her

arrival. In the middle of the floor stood her trunk, and on the trunk she sat in her Sunday dress, her back

turned to the door and her face in her hands. She had not heard Ethan's call because she was sobbing and she

did not hear his step till he stood close behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders.

She started up, lifting her wet face to his. "Ethan I thought I wasn't ever going to see you again!"

He took her in his arms, pressing her close, and with a trembling hand smoothed away the hair from her

She sobbed out: "Jotham said you told him we wasn't to wait dinner for you, and I thought"

She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which was soft yet springy, like certain

mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.

Through the door they heard Zeena's voice calling out from below: "Dan'l Byrne says you better hurry up if

They drew apart with stricken faces. Words of resistance rushed to Ethan's lips and died there. Mattie found

her handkerchief and dried her eyes; then, bending down, she took hold of a handle of the trunk.

She answered: "It takes two to coax it round the corner"; and submitting to this argument he grasped the other

"Now let go," he repeated; then he shouldered the trunk and carried it down the stairs and across the passage

to the kitchen. Zeena, who had gone back to her seat by the stove, did not lift her head from her book as he

passed. Mattie followed him out of the door and helped him to lift the trunk into the back of the sleigh. When

it was in place they stood side by side on the doorstep, watching Daniel Byrne plunge off behind his fidgety

It seemed to Ethan that his heart was bound with cords which an unseen hand was tightening with every tick

of the clock. Twice he opened his lips to speak to Mattie and found no breath. At length, as she turned to

"I'm going to drive you over," he repeated; and she went into the kitchen without answering.

At dinner Ethan could not eat. If he lifted his eyes they rested on Zeena's pinched face, and the corners of her

straight lips seemed to quiver away into a smile. She ate well, declaring that the mild weather made her feel

better, and pressed a second helping of beans on Jotham Powell, whose wants she generally ignored.

Mattie, when the meal was over, went about her usual task of clearing the table and washing up the dishes.

Zeena, after feeding the cat, had returned to her rockingchair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who always

On the threshold he turned back to say to Ethan: "What time'll I come round for Mattie?"

Ethan was standing near the window, mechanically filling his pipe while he watched Mattie move to and fro.

He saw the rise of the colour in Mattie's averted cheek, and the quick lifting of Zeena's head.

"I want you should stay here this afternoon, Ethan," his wife said. "Jotham can drive Mattie over."

Mattie flung an imploring glance at him, but he repeated curtly: "I'm going to drive her over myself."

Zeena continued in the same even tone: "I wanted you should stay and fix up that stove in Mattie's room

Ethan's voice rose indignantly. "If it was good enough for Mattie I guess it's good enough for a hired girl."

"That girl that's coming told me she was used to a house where they had a furnace," Zeena persisted with the

"She'd better ha' stayed there then," he flung back at her; and turning to Mattie he added in a hard voice: "You

Jotham Powell had started for the barn, and Ethan strode down after him aflame with anger. The pulses in his

temples throbbed and a fog was in his eyes. He went about his task without knowing what force directed him,

or whose hands and feet were fulfilling its orders. It was not till he led out the sorrel and backed him between

the shafts of the sleigh that he once more became conscious of what he was doing. As he passed the bridle

over the horse's head, and wound the traces around the shafts, he remembered the day when he had made the

same preparations in order to drive over and meet his wife's cousin at the Flats. It was little more than a year

ago, on just such a soft afternoon, with a "feel" of spring in the air. The sorrel, turning the same big ringed

eye on him, nuzzled the palm of his hand in the same way; and one by one all the days between rose up and

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

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.

"She went upstairs right after dinner. She said she had those shooting pains again, and didn't want to be

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

"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,

"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?"

She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his coatsleeve, 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 pinewood 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 woodanimals had left on it intricate

lacelike patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze.

Ethan drove on in silence till they reached a part of the wood where the pines were more widely spaced, then

he drew up and helped Mattie to get out of the sleigh. They passed between the aromatic trunks, the snow

breaking crisply under their feet, till they came to a small sheet of water with steep wooded sides. Across its

frozen surface, from the farther bank, a single hill rising against the western sun threw the long conical

shadow which gave the lake its name. It was a shy secret spot, full of the same dumb melancholy that Ethan

He looked up and down the little pebbly beach till his eye lit on a fallen treetrunk half submerged in snow.

The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had taken part in together: a "church

picnic" which, on a long afternoon of the preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merrymaking.

Mattie had begged him to go with her but he had refused. Then, toward sunset, coming down from the

mountain where he had been felling timber, he had been caught by some strayed revellers and drawn into the

group by the lake, where Mattie, encircled by facetious youths, and bright as a blackberry under her

spreading hat, was brewing coffee over a gipsy fire. He remembered the shyness he had felt at approaching

her in his uncouth clothes, and then the lighting up of her face, and the way she had broken through the group

to come to him with a cup in her hand. They had sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and she

had missed her gold locket, and set the young men searching for it; and it was Ethan who had spied it in the

moss.... That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they

seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods...

"It was right there I found your locket," he said, pushing his foot into a dense tuft of blueberry bushes.

They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he

was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to

tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.

He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only halfroused from his dream. "There's plenty of time," he answered.

They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were straining to absorb and hold fast the other's

image. There were things he had to say to her before they parted, but he could not say them in that place of

summer memories, and he turned and followed her in silence to the sleigh. As they drove away the sun sank

By a devious track between the fields they wound back to the Starkfield road. Under the open sky the light

was still clear, with a reflection of cold red on the eastern hills. The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to

draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose

As they turned into the Starkfield road Ethan said: "Matt, what do you mean to do?"

She did not answer at once, but at length she said: "I'll try to get a place in a store."

"You know you can't do it. The bad air and the standing all day nearly killed you before."

There seemed to be no answer to this, and again they drove on for a while without speaking. With every yard

of the way some spot where they had stood, and laughed together or been silent, clutched at Ethan and

He lowered his voice to say: "You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you if I could."

She turned to him, pulling a scrap of paper from her breast. "EthanI found this," she stammered. Even in the

failing light he saw it was the letter to his wife that he had begun the night before and forgotten to destroy.

Through his astonishment there ran a fierce thrill of joy. "Matt" he cried; "if I could ha' done it, would you?"

"Oh, Ethan, Ethan what's the use?" With a sudden movement she tore the letter in shreds and sent them

She was silent for a moment; then she said, in such a low tone that he had to stoop his head to hear her: "I

used to think of it sometimes, summer nights, when the moon was so bright I couldn't sleep."

She answered, as if the date had long been fixed for her: "The first time was at Shadow Pond."

"I don't know. Did I? I was dreadfully put out when you wouldn't go to the picnic with me; and then, when I

saw you coming down the road, I thought maybe you'd gone home that way o' purpose; and that made me

They were silent again. They had reached the point where the road dipped to the hollow by Ethan's mill and

as they descended the darkness descended with them, dropping down like a black veil from the heavy

"Oh, what good'll writing do? I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you.

"I don't know how it is you make me feel, Matt. I'd a'most rather have you dead than that!"

"Why shouldn't we, when it's true? I've been wishing it every minute of the day."

They had reached the top of School House Hill and Starkfield lay below them in the twilight. A cutter,

mounting the road from the village, passed them by in a joyous flutter of bells, and they straightened

themselves and looked ahead with rigid faces. Along the main street lights had begun to shine from the

housefronts and stray figures were turning in here and there at the gates. Ethan, with a touch of his whip,

As they drew near the end of the village the cries of children reached them, and they saw a knot of boys, with

"I guess this'll be their last coast for a day or two," Ethan said, looking up at the mild sky.

Still she did not speak and, prompted by an obscure desire to help himself and her through their miserable last

hour, he went on discursively: "Ain't it funny we haven't been down together but just that once last winter?"

They had reached the crest of the Corbury road, and between the indistinct white glimmer of the church and

the black curtain of the Varnum spruces the slope stretched away below them without a sled on its length.

Some erratic impulse prompted Ethan to say: "How'd you like me to take you down now?"

"There's all the time we want. Come along!" His one desire now was to postpone the moment of turning the

The note of authority in his voice seemed to subdue her, and when he had jumped from the sleigh she let him

help her out, saying only, with a vague feint of reluctance: "But there isn't a sled round anywheres."

"Yes, there is! Right over there under the spruces." He threw the bearskin over the sorrel, who stood

passively by the roadside, hanging a meditative head. Then he caught Mattie's hand and drew her after him

She seated herself obediently and he took his place behind her, so close that her hair brushed his face. "All

He laughed contemptuously: "I could go down this coast with my eyes tied!" and she laughed with him, as if

she liked his audacity. Nevertheless he sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill, for it was the

most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the

The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk, gathering smoothness and speed as they

went, with the hollow night opening out below them and the air singing by like an organ. Mattie sat perfectly

still, but as they reached the bend at the foot of the hill, where the big elm thrust out a deadly elbow, he

"Don't be scared, Matt!" he cried exultantly, as they spun safely past it and flew down the second slope; and

when they reached the level ground beyond, and the speed of the sled began to slacken, he heard her give a

They sprang off and started to walk back up the hill. Ethan dragged the sled with one hand and passed the

The strange exaltation of his mood had brought on one of his rare fits of boastfulness. "It is a tricky place,

though. The least swerve, and we'd never ha' come up again. But I can measure distances to a hair'sbreadth

Deep silence had fallen with the starless dusk, and they leaned on each other without speaking; but at every

step of their climb Ethan said to himself: "It's the last time we'll ever walk together."

They mounted slowly to the top of the hill. When they were abreast of the church he stooped his head to her

to ask: "Are you tired?" and she answered, breathing quickly: "It was splendid!"

With a pressure of his arm he guided her toward the Norway spruces. "I guess this sled must be Ned Hale's.

Anyhow I'll leave it where I found it." He drew the sled up to the Varnum gate and rested it against the fence.

"Is this where Ned and Ruth kissed each other?" she whispered breathlessly, and flung her arms about him.

Her lips, groping for his, swept over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise.

She freed herself from his hold and he heard her sobbing. "Oh, I can't go either!" she wailed.

They clung to each other's hands like children, and her body shook with desperate sobs.

He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to leave you now?"

"What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one now?" he said.

She remained motionless, as if she had not heard him. Then she snatched her hands from his, threw her arms

about his neck, and pressed a sudden drenched cheek against his face. "Ethan! Ethan! I want you to take me

She put her lips close against his ear to say: "Right into the big elm. You said you could. So 't we'd never

"Ethan, where'll I go if I leave you? I don't know how to get along alone. You said so yourself just now.

Nobody but you was ever good to me. And there'll be that strange girl in the house... and she'll sleep in my

The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the hated vision of the house he was

going back to of the stairs he would have to go up every night, of the woman who would wait for him there.

And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at last that all that had happened to him

had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return to...

Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer heard what she was saying. Her hat had

slipped back and he was stroking her hair. He wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it would

sleep there like a seed in winter. Once he found her mouth again, and they seemed to be by the pond together

in the burning August sun. But his cheek touched hers, and it was cold and full of weeping, and he saw the

road to the Flats under the night and heard the whistle of the train up the line.

The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence. They might have been in their coffins underground. He

said to himself: "Perhaps it'll feel like this..." and then again: "After this I sha'n't feel anything..."

Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought: "He's wondering why he doesn't get his

Her sombre violence constrained him: she seemed the embodied instrument of fate. He pulled the sled out,

blinking like a nightbird as he passed from the shade of the spruces into the transparent dusk of the open.

The slope below them was deserted. All Starkfield was at supper, and not a figure crossed the open space

before the church. The sky, swollen with the clouds that announce a thaw, hung as low as before a summer

storm. He strained his eyes through the dimness, and they seemed less keen, less capable than usual.

He took his seat on the sled and Mattie instantly placed herself in front of him. Her hat had fallen into the

snow and his lips were in her hair. He stretched out his legs, drove his heels into the road to keep the sled

from slipping forward, and bent her head back between his hands. Then suddenly he sprang up again.

It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat, repeating vehemently: "No, no, no!"

"Get up! Get up!" he urged her; but she kept on repeating: "Why do you want to sit in front?"

"Because I because I want to feel you holding me," he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

The answer seemed to satisfy her, or else she yielded to the power of his voice. He bent down, feeling in the

obscurity for the glassy slide worn by preceding coasters, and placed the runners carefully between its edges.

She waited while he seated himself with crossed legs in the front of the sled; then she crouched quickly down

at his back and clasped her arms about him. Her breath in his neck set him shuddering again, and he almost

sprang from his seat. But in a flash he remembered the alternative. She was right: this was better than parting.

Just as they started he heard the sorrel's whinny again, and the familiar wistful call, and all the confused

images it brought with it, went with him down the first reach of the road. Halfway down there was a sudden

drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious descent. As they took wing for this it seemed to him

that they were flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy night, with Starkfield immeasurably below them,

falling away like a speck in space... Then the big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of the

As they flew toward the tree Mattie pressed her arms tighter, and her blood seemed to be in his veins. Once or

twice the sled swerved a little under them. He slanted his body to keep it headed for the elm, repeating to

himself again and again: "I know we can fetch it"; and little phrases she had spoken ran through his head and

danced before him on the air. The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it he thought:

"It's waiting for us: it seems to know." But suddenly his wife's face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust

itself between him and his goal, and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside. The sled swerved in

response, but he righted it again, kept it straight, and drove down on the black projecting mass. There was a

last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires; and then the elm...

The sky was still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star, and tried vaguely to reckon whether it

were Sirius, or or The effort tired him too much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he would

sleep... The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the

snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he

understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting

through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out

across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to be under his

palm, which rested on something soft and springy. The thought of the animal's suffering was intolerable to

him and he struggled to raise himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying

on him. But he continued to finger about cautiously with his left hand, thinking he might get hold of the little

creature and help it; and all at once he knew that the soft thing he had touched was Mattie's hair and that his

He dragged himself to his knees, the monstrous load on him moving with him as he moved, and his hand

went over and over her face, and he felt that the twittering came from her lips...

He got his face down close to hers, with his ear to her mouth, and in the darkness he saw her eyes open and

"Oh, Matt, I thought we'd fetched it," he moaned; and far off, up the hill, he heard the sorrel whinny, and

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

THE QUERULOUS DRONE ceased as I entered Frome's kitchen, and of the two women sitting there I could

One of them, on my appearing, raised her tall bony figure from her seat, not as if to welcome me for she

threw me no more than a brief glance of surprise but simply to set about preparing the meal which Frome's

absence had delayed. A slatternly calico wrapper hung from her shoulders and the wisps of her thin grey hair

were drawn away from a high forehead and fastened at the back by a broken comb. She had pale opaque eyes

which revealed nothing and reflected nothing, and her narrow lips were of the same sallow colour as her face.

The other woman was much smaller and slighter. She sat huddled in an armchair near the stove, and when I

came in she turned her head quickly toward me, without the least corresponding movement of her body. Her

hair was as grey as her companion's, her face as bloodless and shrivelled, but ambertinted, with swarthy

shadows sharpening the nose and hollowing the temples. Under her shapeless dress her body kept its limp

immobility, and her dark eyes had the bright witchlike stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives.

Even for that part of the country the kitchen was a poorlooking place. With the exception of the darkeyed

woman's chair, which looked like a soiled relic of luxury bought at a country auction, the furniture was of the

roughest kind. Three coarse china plates and a brokennosed milkjug had been set on a greasy table scored

with knifecuts, and a couple of strawbottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood

"My, it's cold here! The fire must be 'most out," Frome said, glancing about him apologetically as he

The tall woman, who had moved away from us toward the dresser, took no notice; but the other, from her

cushioned niche, answered complainingly, in a high thin voice. "It's on'y just been made up this very minute.

Zeena fell asleep and slep' ever so long, and I thought I'd be frozen stiff before I could wake her up and get

Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains of a cold mincepie in a battered

piedish, set down her unappetising burden without appearing to hear the accusation brought against her.

Frome stood hesitatingly before her as she advanced; then he looked at me and said: "This is my wife, Mis'

Frome." After another interval he added, turning toward the figure in the armchair: "And this is Miss Mattie

Mrs. Hale, tender soul, had pictured me as lost in the Flats and buried under a snowdrift; and so lively was

her satisfaction on seeing me safely restored to her the next morning that I felt my peril had caused me to

Great was her amazement, and that of old Mrs. Varnum, on learning that Ethan Frome's old horse had carried

me to and from Corbury Junction through the worst blizzard of the winter; greater still their surprise when

Beneath their wondering exclamations I felt a secret curiosity to know what impressions I had received from

my night in the Frome household, and divined that the best way of breaking down their reserve was to let

them try to penetrate mine. I therefore confined myself to saying, in a matteroffact tone, that I had been

received with great kindness, and that Frome had made a bed for me in a room on the groundfloor which

seemed in happier days to have been fitted up as a kind of writingroom or study.

"Well," Mrs. Hale mused, "in such a storm I suppose he felt he couldn't do less than take you in but I guess

it went hard with Ethan. I don't believe but what you're the only stranger has set foot in that house for over

twenty years. He's that proud he don't even like his oldest friends to go there; and I don't know as any do, any

"I used to go a good deal after the accident, when I was first married; but after awhile I got to think it made

'em feel worse to see us. And then one thing and another came, and my own troubles... But I generally make

out to drive over there round about New Year's, and once in the summer. Only I always try to pick a day

when Ethan's off somewheres. It's bad enough to see the two women sitting there but his face, when he

looks round that bare place, just kills me... You see, I can look back and call it up in his mother's day, before

Old Mrs. Varnum, by this time, had gone up to bed, and her daughter and I were sitting alone, after supper, in

the austere seclusion of the horsehair parlour. Mrs. Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though trying to see

how much footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed that if she had kept silence till now it was because

she had been waiting, through all the years, for some one who should see what she alone had seen.

I waited to let her trust in me gather strength before I said: "Yes, it's pretty bad, seeing all three of them there

She drew her mild brows into a frown of pain. "It was just awful from the beginning. I was here in the house

when they were carried up they laid Mattie Silver in the room you're in. She and I were great friends, and

she was to have been my bridesmaid in the spring... When she came to I went up to her and stayed all night.

They gave her things to quiet her, and she didn't know much till to'rd morning, and then all of a sudden she

woke up just like herself, and looked straight at me out of her big eyes, and said... Oh, I don't know why I'm

She took off her spectacles, wiped the moisture from them, and put them on again with an unsteady hand. "It

got about the next day," she went on, "that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a

hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she and Ethan were doing that night

coasting, when they'd ought to have been on their way to the Flats to ketch the train... I never knew myself

what Zeena thought I don't to this day. Nobody knows Zeena's thoughts. Anyhow, when she heard o' the

accident she came right in and stayed with Ethan over to the minister's, where they'd carried him. And as

soon as the doctors said that Mattie could be moved, Zeena sent for her and took her back to the farm."

Mrs. Hale answered simply: "There was nowhere else for her to go;" and my heart tightened at the thought of

"Yes, there she's been," Mrs. Hale continued, "and Zeena's done for her, and done for Ethan, as good as she

could. It was a miracle, considering how sick she was but she seemed to be raised right up just when the call

came to her. Not as she's ever given up doctoring, and she's had sick spells right along; but she's had the

strength given her to care for those two for over twenty years, and before the accident came she thought she

Mrs. Hale paused a moment, and I remained silent, plunged in the vision of what her words evoked. "It's

"Yes: it's pretty bad. And they ain't any of 'em easy people either. Mattie was, before the accident; I never

knew a sweeter nature. But she's suffered too much that's what I always say when folks tell me how she's

soured. And Zeena, she was always cranky. Not but what she bears with Mattie wonderful I've seen that

myself. But sometimes the two of them get going at each other, and then Ethan's face'd break your heart...

When I see that, I think it's him that suffers most... anyhow it ain't Zeena, because she ain't got the time... It's

a pity, though," Mrs. Hale ended, sighing, "that they're all shut up there'n that one kitchen. In the

summertime, on pleasant days, they move Mattie into the parlour, or out in the dooryard, and that makes it

easier... but winters there's the fires to be thought of; and there ain't a dime to spare up at the Fromes.'"

Mrs. Hale drew a deep breath, as though her memory were eased of its long burden, and she had no more to

She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the beadwork tablecover, and went on with

lowered voice: "There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't

live. Well, I say it's a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was shocked at me. Only he

wasn't with me that morning when she first came to... And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and

the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes

down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."