1 When they returned to the kitchen the two women were already at breakfast.
2 All the way down to the village he continued to think of his return to Mattie.
3 "Oh, she'd never leave us as long as you needed her," he returned, scraping hard at his chin.
4 The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anaesthetic.
5 "Jotham Powell's down in the wood-lot, and Dan'l Byrne says he darsn't leave that horse," she returned.
6 But I haven't got the time now; I'm late as it is, he returned, holding his old silver turnip-watch to the candle.
7 Ethan, looking slowly about the kitchen, said to himself with a shudder that in a few hours he would be returning to it alone.
8 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.
9 Then the girl had returned to her task of clearing up the kitchen for the night and he had taken his lantern and gone on his usual round outside the house.
10 He said to himself that he had doubtless exaggerated the significance of Zeena's threats, and that she too, with the return of daylight, would come to a saner mood.
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 Ethan made a pretext of getting up to replenish the stove, and when he returned to his seat he pushed it sideways that he might get a view of her profile and of the lamplight falling on her hands.
13 And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return to.
14 Her nearest relations had been induced to place their savings in her father's hands, and though, after his death, they ungrudgingly acquitted themselves of the Christian duty of returning good for evil by giving his daughter all the advice at their disposal, they could hardly be expected to supplement it by material aid.