Aunt Valeria opened the gate, and Ethan followed her up the half-dozen stone steps and along the brick-paved path to the porch. There in the doorway, between the big Doric columns, stood a tall, slim woman, dressed in black, with masses of silvered hair nearly covered by a white veil. Her face was furrowed, but she wore a look of welcome and a light of unquenched youth in her smiling eyes that made the child smile too, feeling himself no stranger, but as one who had come home. She set her hands on either side his face and kissed him. "But where is Mr. Tallmadge?" Mrs. Gano asked her daughter when they were in the hall. "Gone on to Cincinnati. He didn't get out of the train." "_What?_ He never left this child to the chance of--" Ethan had never seen any one look so angry. The eyes that had been smiling flashed a steely blue fire. He shrank away to the neighborhood of the more friendly umbrellas in the hat-rack. "Oh, he knew we would be sure to meet him," said Aunt Valeria, apologetically. "One can never be sure of anything of the kind! Suppose either you or I had been very ill! To drop a little child like that on a strange platform, as you would a sack of corn--" Ethan felt covered with shame at the conduct of his uncle. He had heard Mrs. Gano herself criticised in Boston, but he felt now that her standards, after all, seemed higher, and her eyes were certainly more terrifying than any in the house of Tallmadge. The hackman was struggling up-stairs with the trunk, Mrs. Gano bidding him have a care of the paper and the balustrade. Ethan noticed there was a big open door at the end of the hall and a vision through of a veranda and green trees. In the hall was an oaken hat-rack, with umbrella-stand and two carved oaken chairs on either side, with high fleur-de-lis backs. While his grandmother was paying the hackman, the child discovered that the seats of these chairs lifted up in a miraculous manner. Unnoticed, he raised one a little and inserted his hand--something prickly, even porcupiney! He withdrew precipitately. Was it a beast in there, or only a brush? He resolved upon cautious exploration at a more convenient season. The hackman was going now, and Aunt Valeria was taking the boy up-stairs to be washed. "Don't be long," said his grandmother, smiling over the banister as he went up; "supper is ready." What a comfort that she seemed to have forgotten Uncle Tallmadge's disgraceful conduct!