her
small strange laugh. "I knew the cat was a smart cat," she said in a
high voice, "but I didn't know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces
of my pickle-dish and lay 'em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked
'em off of."

Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. "It wasn't
Ethan's fault, Zeena! The cat did break the dish; but I got it down from
the china-closet, and I'm the one to blame for its getting broken."

Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony
image of resentment, "You got down my pickle-dish-what for?"

A bright flush flew to Mattie's cheeks. "I wanted to make the
supper-table pretty," she said.

"You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back
was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I've got,
and wouldn't never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner,
or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge--" Zeena paused with a
gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. "You're a
bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It's the way your father
begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my
things where you couldn't get at 'em--and now you've took from me the one
I cared for most of all--" She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that
passed and left her more than ever like a shape of stone.

"If I'd 'a' listened to folks, you'd 'a' gone before now, and this
wouldn't 'a' happened," she said; and gathering up the bits of broken
glass she went out of the room as if she carried a dead body...

VIII

When Ethan was called back to the farm by his father's illness his
mother gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted
"best parlour." Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built
himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on
a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham
Lincoln and a calendar with "Thoughts from the Poets," and tried, with
these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a
"minister" who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at
Worcester. 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.

To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena's
steady breathing from the bed had assu