"He took the boy up to the top of the highest hill in the country, and said, 'You are young, my son, but I am about to give you your inheritance. Look abroad'--and he stretched out his arms--'behold, I give you the world! Go forth and take what portion you will.'" Val drew a quick breath. "Ha! I know what _I_ want." "What do you think you want, little girl?" "I want to be loved--oh, but tremendously! And I want to do some one thing awfully, awfully well." It was the most old-fashioned, unchildlike speech of which Val had ever delivered herself. "Well, my dear," her father spoke, dreamily, "to be greatly loved, and to do well some one piece of work, isn't a bad destiny. Older heads than yours would be at a loss to better it." Even to her father, even in that moment of great outgoing, she had not liked to particularize what it was she wanted to do so "awfully, awfully well." But there was no doubt in her own mind that she was going to be a dancer. She practised every rainy day, and sometimes when it didn't rain, down in the dark parlor, where it smelt so solemn and musty. There was a huge oil-painting on the north wall, of Daniel Boone and his dogs and other friends "Discovering Kentucky." Although their eyes were turned ever towards "the dark and bloody ground," they were Val's audience. To the burly hunter and his raccoon-capped and shaggy companions she bowed and pirouetted, waved her arms and tossed her heels. She did not dare touch the old rosewood piano after one or two rapturous attacks upon the yellow keys had brought swift retribution out of her grandmother's chamber; but dancing was not only a glorious and heady excitement, but, unlike most of this young person's pastimes, it was noiseless; it could be carried on by the hour without rousing any one's suspicions, unless perchance a vague uneasiness as to "what keeps that child so quiet." When discovered, she was usually found to be breathlessly examining the gilt-edged annuals and gift-books on the centre table, or else staring into the "stereopticon," though what view was visible in that dim light remained a marvel. Perhaps the most memorable crisis of her childhood had found her in the twilight of that musty parlor. It was a pale-gray, teeming spring morning, after a night of rain--Saturday, and yet she had been forbidden to go and see her friends next door. "When _I_ was a little girl I didn't live at the neighbors'." Val had been learning lessons, perched in the high window-seat of her own room, looking out now and then with a glad sense of coming summer to the early red of maple blossoms, and off to the blue Mioto Hills, that rose on the other side the river, shutting in her world. Presently, down below the rain-soaked terraces, in Mioto Avenue, a street-organ began to play.