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 deceiving two kindly people who had pitied
him.

He turned and walked slowly back to the farm.

IX

At the kitchen door Daniel Byrne sat in his sleigh behind a big-boned
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 which he had had to pay extra postage only a
few days before.

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."

The blood rushed to his face. "Getting down her trunk--alone?"

"Jotham Powell's down in the wood-lot, 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 there was no answer, and he put his hand on the door-knob.

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 red-and-white quilt on her narrow
bed, the pretty pin-cushion 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 h