CHAPTER V Although this visit was the only one Ethan was destined to pay to New Plymouth before he came to man's estate, he carried back with him to Boston at the holiday's end something more than an intimate understanding with his father's people, and a vivid picture of the outer aspect of life in the house of his grandmother. Out of his fear of Aunt Jerusha that first evening grew the habit of Valeria's visiting his room ten minutes or so after he had said good-night. During those first evenings, when he was allowed a candle to go to bed by, this small attention on his aunt's part was for the ostensible purpose of putting out the light and opening his windows. Later on she went for no better reason than that the child would be expecting her. Absent-minded dreamer as she was, after the second evening of Ethan's stay she never forgot what became her kindly custom. On this particular evening, as she sat among the litter in the blue room, her acute ears caught a faint sound of sobbing. She hurried into the adjoining chamber, and found all dark and silent, Ethan breathing regularly, apparently asleep. She bent over in the faint moonlight to kiss him, and found his face wet with tears. "My dear! Then it was _you_?" "Me?" he inquired, in a steady voice. "Yes. Why were you crying?" After a pause: "I thought the walls were so awful thick," he said, as if answering her question with all circumstance. "Shall I light the candle again?" "No, thank you," he said, sedately; "I can see the moon through the locust-tree." She went to the window, and leaning her folded arms on the wide seat, she repeated softly, as she looked out: "'And, like a dying lady, lean and pale, Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky east A white and shapeless mass.'" "Is that what you've been writing, Aunt Valeria?" "No." She came back and sat down on the side of his bed. "No; Shelley wrote it. What shall I do for you?" she said, wondering how women that were used to children would meet the exigency, for the little voice was plaintive in spite of itself. "I don't want anything," Ethan said, stoutly, and there was another pause. Then, by way of a delicate hint: "Grandmamma has been telling me a story." "Has she?" "Yes; about when she was young. Tell me about when _you_ were young, Aunt Valeria." The innocent petition jarred. Valeria was the youngest of her family, and had never yet been asked to think of herself as one who had left youth behind. "There's nothing to tell about me," she said. "Didn't you ever cross the Alleghanies in a stage-coach?" "No; all that was before my time." "Didn't you ever go to visit your grandfather Calvert in the mountains of Virginia?" "No; he died before I was born."