1 He has his office in Worcester, and comes over once a fortnight to Shadd's Falls and Bettsbridge for consultations.
2 But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of transplanting her.
3 But it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth.
4 Then a man's figure approached, coming so close to her that under their formless wrappings they seemed merged in one dim outline.
5 "That girl that's coming told me she was used to a house where they had a furnace," Zeena persisted with the same monotonous mildness.
6 As he reached the door he met Zeena coming back into the room, her lips twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face.
7 Then, when the loading finally began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and the tree trunks were so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift them and get them in place on the sledge.
8 Her companion, who was just coming back to the table with the remains of a cold mince-pie in a battered pie-dish, set down her unappetising burden without appearing to hear the accusation brought against her.
9 He had scrambled up on the logs, and was sitting astride of them, close over his shaggy grays, when, coming between him and their streaming necks, he had a vision of the warning look that Mattie had given him the night before.
10 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.
11 It got about the next day," she went on, "that Zeena Frome had sent Mattie off in a hurry because she had a hired girl coming, and the folks here could never rightly tell what she and Ethan were doing that night coasting, when they'd ought to have been on their way to the Flats to ketch the train.
12 Then, toward sunset, coming down from the mountain where he had been felling timber, he had been caught by some strayed revellers and drawn into the group by the lake, where Mattie, encircled by facetious youths, and bright as a blackberry under her spreading hat, was brewing coffee over a gipsy fire.