1 Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw.
2 As she passed Ethan's chair their eyes met and clung together desolately.
3 Once he found her mouth again, and they seemed to be by the pond together in the burning August sun.
4 They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars.
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 With every yard of the way some spot where they had stood, and laughed together or been silent, clutched at Ethan and dragged him back.
7 But their evening together had given him a vision of what life at her side might be, and he was glad now that he had done nothing to trouble the sweetness of the picture.
8 The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more alone.
9 If he glued it together the next morning months might elapse before his wife noticed what had happened, and meanwhile he might after all be able to match the dish at Shadd's Falls or Bettsbridge.
10 It was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years together, and Ethan felt as if he had lost an irretrievable advantage in descending to the level of recrimination.
11 The entertainment of which he spoke was one of the few that they had taken part in together: a "church picnic" which, on a long afternoon of the preceding summer, had filled the retired place with merry-making.
12 There he lit a candle-end, opened the china-closet, and, reaching his long arm up to the highest shelf, laid the pieces together with such accuracy of touch that a close inspection convinced him of the impossibility of detecting from below that the dish was broken.
13 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.
14 For the first time they would be alone together indoors, and they would sit there, one on each side of the stove, like a married couple, he in his stocking feet and smoking his pipe, she laughing and talking in that funny way she had, which was always as new to him as if he had never heard her before.