o for you?" he repeated.

"If you say you can't afford a hired girl when Mattie goes."

Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped to catch the
reflection of his stretched cheek in the blotched looking-glass above
the wash-stand.

"Why on earth should Mattie go?"

"Well, when she gets married, I mean," his wife's drawl came from behind
him.

"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 Denis Eady," Zeena answered in
a tone of plaintive self-effacement.

Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his head back to draw
the razor from ear to chin. His hand was steady, but the attitude was an
excuse for not making an immediate reply.

"And the doctor don't want I should be left without anybody," Zeena
continued. "He wanted I should speak to you about a girl he's heard
about, that might come--"

Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself with a laugh.

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

"Well, I'd like to talk to you about it," said Zeena obstinately.

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," he returned, holding his
old silver turnip-watch to the candle.

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: "I guess you're always late, now you shave every morning."

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 t