Mrs. Gano rose from her chair; the door opened, and in came Miss Hannah. Whether it was chance, or whether she had been waiting outside for the psychological moment, certainly her entrance was opportune. She went through her greeting with a flustered civility that, by its own extreme nervousness, made the situation she had broken in upon seem calm to the point of commonplace. Mrs. Gano found herself trying to put Miss Hannah at her ease. The tall, thin spinster, with her smooth gray hair and anxious manner, must have been more than double the age of Ethan's mother. Supper would be ready in twenty minutes. "Of course," she said, "you will stay? Ethan has just been asking if he mayn't sit up a little later to-night." "Ethan!" Potent conjuration! Mrs. Gano had not come all this way to look after her grandson's welfare and be turned back by a fanatical outbreak on the part of a bigoted Abolitionist. No, and if plain speaking was to be the order of the day, Mr. Tallmadge should not do it all. He had it his own way, however, in the long grace with which he prefaced supper, a performance that sounded in Mrs. Gano's ears aggressively Presbyterian. It appeared at that meal that Miss Hannah was disposed to be indulgent to her little nephew, and that he was devoted to her. He talked very little, and what he had to say he confided in a whisper to his aunt. But as he ate, he stared unceasingly with great gloomy eyes at his grandmother. She saw with deep misgiving that he was permitted to make the same meal as his elders. He declined to share his aunt's decoction of "shells," as she quaintly called cocoa, and joined his grandparents in a large cup of coffee. He bolted down quantities of that moist and leaden Boston brown bread which Mrs. Gano regarded with amazement and alarm, and he seemed to share the New England taste for beans and bacon, a fare which, in the visitor's mind, ranked with the "hog and hominy" of the hard-working plantation blacks; but to place such food before a little delicate child! After supper his aunt took him on her lap, and, while Mr. Tallmadge and his guest skirted dangerous topics with stately politeness, Miss Tallmadge, in the corner by the fire, was softly repeating nursery rhymes to the little Ethan. Others might have been struck by the picture of the gaunt, childless woman and her ready assumption of the mother rôle; Mrs. Gano was vaguely conscious of a kind of remissness in herself in having omitted to tell her own children a word about little Nannie Etticott or Cock Robin. In all her life of maternal solicitude she had never once mentioned "Hey-diddle-diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," or even hinted at the existence of "the Little Man who had a little gun." Presently, in the midst of Mr. Tallmadge's remarks upon the beauties of Boston Common, Mrs. Gano caught the child's more and more insistent demand for some joy which Miss Tallmadge was minded to withhold. In spite of "Sh! sh!" more and more shrill came the iteration: