"Oh, we must get the opera idea out of her head. I am quite of your opinion there."
"Ha, really?" said John Gano, with a relieved, almost incredulous air. "You think there's something in what I say?"
"_Most_ assuredly." He got up with renewed energy. "I'll tell her that the women who take up the despised craft of home-making and home-keeping will be not only the true artists of the future, they'll be the only order of working-women, never in want of a place."
As Ethan went to his room he indulged the cynical suspicion that his uncle had some definite vision of the particular home that Val was to labor for and ornament, and it was not the Fort. Well? He smiled. Pshaw! "Am I growing old, that a little school-girl should get hold of me after all my escapes?" For so much had his social experience warped him that he seldom thought of marriage now, save as of something others plotted and which he must frustrate and elude.
Val! He laughed to himself. Absurd! But his face had little amusement in it, and less irony than he would have credited. "The older men grow," he said to himself, "the more the fainter-hearted among them shrink from age, the more they worship youth. Now, if I were fifty I might be in danger."
Going down, after writing some letters, an hour or so later, he heard "the little school-girl" coming behind him, and then stopping suddenly.
"That you, Val?" He stood waiting. No answer. She had gone back into her room. He stood stamping his letters under the hall lamp.
Val's head presently peered down from the top of the stair.
"Yes, I'm here," said Ethan, provokingly.
"I'm looking for one of the servants," Val said, descending with dignity.
Ethan looked up, laughing at her over the banisters.
"What makes you look so solemn?" he asked.
"My sister's got a sore throat, and I can't find the stuff for a compress."
"No use telling me you're such a sympathetic sister as you make out. What's the _real_ matter?"
Ethan had come down-stairs, intending to be more discreet than ever in the future. De Poincy was no doubt right--even here it was necessary to be _en garde_. With this idea dragged well into the foreground again, what demon of perversity made him lift a hand above the banisters and hold the girl's fingers fast to the polished rail? It was the first time he had touched her. He was rather startled at the commotion set up in his own nerves by the trifling action, but it was mainly, he assured himself, the reflex of the evident agitation of the girl. She had dropped her eyes, and he saw her upper lip tremble.