"We've been telling ghost stories," said Ethan, as Val slipped out. CHAPTER XXII Mrs. Gano sat with Emmie that evening in the long room. The little girl had been having restless nights, and had fallen asleep just before supper. Val went alone into the parlor after that meal, and waited for the two men to join her. They were smoking in the dining-room--a thing unprecedented. They stayed a long time. Eight o'clock--nine o'clock--nearly ten. Val lay down on the sofa in the shadow behind the big arm-chair, so worn out with emotion she fell asleep. By-and-by, through the mist of her dreaming, the low sound of voices broke: her father's, with that familiar note of weary cheerfulness, and now another, deep, vibrant, full of mutiny and music. She lay a moment with shut eyes, her half-awakened senses luxuriously steeped in the sound, careless of the meaning. Now her father answered. Ah, how long his insistent staccato kept striking the troubled air. It was plain he was in one of his talking moods, when there was no stopping him, just as for days--sometimes for weeks--there would be no such thing as getting more than "Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," across his tightened lips. She was dropping off to sleep again when suddenly Ethan's voice stabbed her broad awake, saying: "The world is a cruel place, the world is an evil place, _ergo_, I hate the world." "No, no, you're wrong," said John Gano. "You're blind if you don't see the world is beautiful, is rooted in triumphing good." Val sat up in the dark corner behind the chair, ready to cry "Hear, hear!" "I admit," her father went on, "that man has defiled it and made it a den of thieves." "Comes to the same thing in the end, although I don't agree--" "It does _not_ come to the same thing. There's all the difference in what it "comes to" between the curable and the incurable. You and I may not live to see it, but the world will one day be a fit habitation for better men than we." Val, peering out, saw Ethan shake his head. "When men are truly brothers, when we have worked the ape and tiger out, when we may be fortunate without blood-guiltiness. Even _you_," his uncle went on, a swell of enthusiasm lifting up his voice--"even you may live to see men realizing that Science is the great Captain, the true Redeemer. I should envy you your chance of hailing the beginning of that bloodless revolution, except that I am as sure of its coming as my neighbor's children's children will be when they have ocular proof and daily profit of it." "I wish I were as sure of it as you."