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 cloud-flocks 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 e