1 As she passed Ethan's chair their eyes met and clung together desolately.
2 Mattie, in an instant, had sprung from her chair and was down on her knees by the fragments.
3 Her tone was so sweet that he took the pipe from his mouth and drew his chair up to the table.
4 They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden, jumped between them into Zeena's empty chair.
5 Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen.
6 For a while she sat motionless, as if reflecting, her arms stretched along the arms of her chair, her eyes fixed on vacancy.
7 When he returned to the kitchen Mattie had pushed up his chair to the stove and seated herself near the lamp with a bit of sewing.
8 The cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot, and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a spectral rocking.
9 With the exception of the dark-eyed woman's chair, which looked like a soiled relic of luxury bought at a country auction, the furniture was of the roughest kind.
10 The cat, who had been a puzzled observer of these unusual movements, jumped up into Zeena's chair, rolled itself into a ball, and lay watching them with narrowed eyes.
11 Zeena, after feeding the cat, had returned to her rocking-chair by the stove, and Jotham Powell, who always lingered last, reluctantly pushed back his chair and moved toward the door.
12 She had measured out some drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed and, after swallowing them, and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow flannel, had lain down with her face turned away.
13 The sun slanted through the south window on the girl's moving figure, on the cat dozing in a chair, and on the geraniums brought in from the door-way, where Ethan had planted them in the summer to "make a garden" for Mattie.
14 Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood meagrely against the plaster walls.
15 She changed her position, leaning forward to bend her head above her work, so that he saw only the foreshortened tip of her nose and the streak of red in her hair; then she slipped to her feet, saying "I can't see to sew," and went back to her chair by the lamp.
16 The next morning at breakfast Jotham Powell was between them, and Ethan tried to hide his joy under an air of exaggerated indifference, lounging back in his chair to throw scraps to the cat, growling at the weather, and not so much as offering to help Mattie when she rose to clear away the dishes.