red 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
tobacco-pouch 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 words were written: "Don't trouble, Ethan."

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 voice, only cold paper and dead words!

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 narrow-mindedness
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 healthy instincts
of self-defence rose up in him against such waste...

He bundled himself into his old coon-skin coat and lay down on the
box-sofa 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 propped his head against the wall...

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 do