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 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 house-work and found oblique
ways of attracting attention to the girl's inefficiency. Zeena had