He walked on to the church corner and entered the shade of the Varnum spruces, where he had stood with her the night before.  As he passed into their gloom he saw an indistinct outline just ahead of him.  At his approach it melted for an instant into two separate shapes and then conjoined again, and he heard a kiss, and a half-laughing “Oh!” provoked by the discovery of his presence.  Again the outline hastily disunited and the Varnum gate slammed on one half while the other hurried on ahead of him.  Ethan smiled at the discomfiture he had caused.  What did it matter to Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum if they were caught kissing each other?  Everybody in Starkfield knew they were engaged.  It pleased Ethan to have surprised a pair of lovers on the spot where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts; but he felt a pang at the thought that these two need not hide their happiness.

He fetched the grays from Hale’s stable and started on his long climb back to the farm.  The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow.  Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue.  In an hour or two the moon would push over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them.  A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.

Ethan’s ears were alert for the jingle of sleigh-bells, but not a sound broke the silence of the lonely road.  As he drew near the farm he saw, through the thin screen of larches at the gate, a light twinkling in the house above him.  “She’s up in her room,” he said to himself, “fixing herself up for supper”; and he remembered Zeena’s sarcastic stare when Mattie, on the evening of her arrival, had come down to supper with smoothed hair and a ribbon at her neck.

He passed by the graves on the knoll and turned his head to glance at one of the older headstones, which had interested him deeply as a boy because it bore his name.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

Ethan frome and endurance his wife,

WHO DWELLED TOGETHER IN PEACE

For fifty years.

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.  Then, with a sudden dart of irony, he wondered if, when their turn came, the same epitaph would be written over him and Zeena.

He opened the barn-door and craned his head into the obscurity, half-fearing to discover Denis Eady’s roan colt in the stall beside the sorrel.  But the old horse was there alone, mumbling his crib with toothless jaws, and Ethan whistled cheerfully while he bedded down the grays and shook an extra measure of oats into their mangers.  His was not a tuneful throat-but harsh melodies burst from it as he locked the barn and sprang up the hill to the house.  He reached the kitchen-porch and turned the door-handle; but the door did not yield to his touch.