"There was music before _his_ day. And Tennyson is one of them that hath ears to hear, as well as tongue to speak. Small doubt but from his ivied casement in the West he heard the voice of the Lord from out the chambers of the South. 'Canst thou bind the secret influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his suns?'" "I can see Cassiopeia," Val would observe, just to show that she was not quite out of it. And she would grasp her father's hand tighter, to remind him of their agreement that the straggling W stood for "We"--Val and her father. Then he would find Lyra and the Little Bear, and tell how the Milky Way, instead of being, as Hiawatha and Val had thought, "pathway of the ghosts and shadows," was really star-dust, the scattered nebulæ of other suns and systems. Mrs. Gano would look back before going in-doors, and say, with solemn upward gaze: "Yes, yes! 'An undevout astronomer is mad.'" Then they would go in silently to bed. CHAPTER XII A letter by the late post from cousin Ethan! It would be the last before he himself would appear. Emmie watched, with luminous eyes, her grandmother's opening of the envelope. Val, in banishment, waited impatiently outside in the dusk on the stairs to hear the news; but the face of the reader in the long room darkened as she read. She dropped the letter in her lap at the close, speechless. "Oh! what is it, gran'ma?" quivered the sympathetic Emmie. The old lady merely turned away her head. "Gran'ma, he isn't _dead_?" "No, not exactly dead," she said, very low. "He is very ill?" "No. He is gone again to France." "But I thought he was coming here for _sure_ this time?" "So did I; not so Aaron Tallmadge!" The name swept out like a sudden gust, scattering to the winds her unnatural calm. "But you said he was nearly of age, when he would be his own master." "Aaron Tallmadge remembered that." Her lips trembled with anger, and the big chair seemed to share her agitation. She held on to the red padded arms, as though she rocked on the high seas in a gale. "When Ethan comes of age he'll be five thousand miles away." "But can't you stop him? Let Venie take a telegwaf." "No, no!" The high wind, in which the great chair rocked, died down, the angry animation faded out of the old face, leaving it older still and very weary. "No, no; these things are not to be forced. It's natural. He has been with Aaron Tallmadge all his days; he is his heir. He lives in a world where men think much of the bond of money, and little of the bond of blood. I shall not write again." She folded up the letter and put it in its envelope. Her head drooped over the task. "I thought cousin Ethan loved being here?" "A long time ago. He was very little." "But he never forgot?" "It used to seem so." Lower the old head sank, till the folds of white veil, falling on either side, met like two drawn curtains across her face.