1 She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her.
2 He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes.
3 All his life was lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and he could no longer conceive of its being otherwise.
4 It was his wife who had suggested, when the girl came to live with them, that such opportunities should be put in her way.
5 He used to think that fifty years sounded like a long time to live together, but now it seemed to him that they might pass in a flash.
6 A moment ago he had wondered what he and Mattie were to live on when they reached the West; now he saw that he had not even the money to take her there.
7 He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he had to give her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several months of the year.
8 Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives.
9 She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding.
10 Ethan tried to say something befitting the occasion, but there was only one thought in his mind: the fact that, for the first time since Mattie had come to live with them, Zeena was to be away for a night.
11 She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live."
12 Mrs. Hale, tender soul, had pictured me as lost in the Flats and buried under a snow-drift; and so lively was her satisfaction on seeing me safely restored to her the next morning that I felt my peril had caused me to advance several degrees in her favour.
13 Mattie Silver had lived under his roof for a year, and from early morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing her; but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they walked back through the night to the farm.
14 Four or five years earlier he had taken a year's course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally different associations of thought in which he had since been living.