"Ethan and Val?" he said, absent-mindedly. His mother nodded. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. He might be left to less entertaining people than Val." "Precisely." They looked at each other in silence for a moment. "You don't mean--Val? Why, she's a child." "She is older than my mother was when I was born." "You don't think that Ethan--" He was suddenly alert, anxious. "No, no; I don't think it's his fault. He, too, looks upon her as a child. But it would be better if he went away." "Ah! Ah, indeed; I wish I'd realized. We'll get him away as soon as possible." His air of sudden energy seemed perhaps over-anxious. "Don't do anything to excite suspicion. He is quite ready to go away with you at the end of the week." "Where is he now?" demanded her son. "In the parlor with Val." They came down-stairs together, Mrs. Gano going back to Emmie. Her son laid his hand on the parlor door with something both anxious and inflexible in his manner. It might appear that the little scene on the other side was easily interrupted by a less extravagant expenditure of energy. So little may we know the people we spend our lives with, that the not unobservant old woman at the opposite door thought there was no more in her son's mind than in her own--a wish to save Val the pain of an unrequited devotion. The talk with Ethan to which Mrs. Gano had just referred had taken place less than an hour before. Although it had been a most discreet interchange, beginning and ending with John Gano, it had left the young man in a state of acute discomfort and vague rage at fate. Why had he not gone away before? Why should his lingering be punished by this awful infliction of the care of his uncle, or at best his escort hundreds of miles away, and his establishment in Georgia? It was too much. He had been ready to deal generously with these queer relations in the matter of money. But to refuse his help to keep a whole roof over their heads, and then calmly to demand this of him! It made him laugh, but it made him angry too. He cursed his folly and inertia, as he called it, in staying on. Why, he might have been at Tuxedo at this moment! He had wasted enough time here to have gone to the Riviera. But as he thought of the dozens of things he might have done, a sharp realization came to him of the inner dulness of these outwardly glittering ways of killing time. He had tried them all; he knew them for what they were worth. Whether work or play, they were just so many devices for shortening the spun-out tale of days. He knew of old where such thoughts would lead him. He walked up and down from Daniel Boone to the mirror, glowering out from time to time at the rain. Beast of a day! Where was everybody? Suddenly he opened the door. Val started back. "Oh--a--oh!" she said, confused. "I was just coming to see if--" She stopped, obviously at a loss. "And I was just wondering where you were all this time." She came in smiling and flushing, and shut the door.