Close as was her relationship with her father, there was more than one thing she never told him. She never spoke of her grandmother's brutality. She sympathized with him silently for having such a mother, and felt that they were fellow-sufferers under her iron rule. Did she not make him, too, do things he didn't want to do--make him go out and walk when he preferred to sit still, reprove him for trying his eyes by the waning light, and even at times pass severe strictures on his clothes and his opinions? He was much better and stronger after a couple of quiet years at the Fort; but it was cruel of her grandmother to speak in that way about his "yielding to lassitude and inertia," and hint that he was "quite as well now as many of the men who were carrying on the work of the world." "Health," she would say, "is a comparative term. No one is perfectly healthy, any more than any one is perfectly good." But this innocent-sounding platitude was evidently annoying to John Gano. It was after one of these painful talks about his rousing himself (of which Val heard only the concluding phrases) that he had tried to get back into the bank. It wasn't his fault that Mr. Otway couldn't make an opening for him. John Gano had even been urged into making visits to Cincinnati and New York to see if he could find something. He came back from these quests depressed and ill, not mentioning in Val's hearing having found anything but an unusually fine specimen of the _Ardea herodias_, or something of the sort, on the far Atlantic coast. But for long after these expeditions he would talk vehemently to his mother of the fierce competition of the great cities, of the growing costliness and cruelty of civilization, and speak darkly of the coming social revolution, when the poor should learn their power. But Val realized, and felt miserably certain her father realized, that Mrs. Gano did not much concern herself with the large historic outlook, that she would have preferred knowing her son had secured a clerkship, even under some bloated bondholder, rather than hear that the doom of capital was nigh, and that Henry George was revolutionizing opinion about the land-tax. But this particular difference of view was a delicate matter, not seemly for a daughter to mention. Her father, being a kind of hero, of course never complained; neither would Val. His sense of loyalty even led him to excuse his mother when only her own misdeeds arraigned her, as when, after Emmie began to go to school, she was allowed to stay at home whenever she cried, whenever it rained, whenever she liked--and Val never on any pretext whatsoever. "She thinks Emmie has a delicate chest, you see," her father had explained. "You are such a hard little nut--no danger of your cracking."