"Gracious Peter! say good-bye?" The guest drew back in genuine alarm. "You may just bet I won't say 'beans' before her from now till Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning. Did you hear the last thing she said to me? My!"
"No; I was playing 'Dixie Land.'"
"Yes; and all through it she kept looking at the clock, and when you got to the loud part she leaned over and asked me whether I expected my father or a servant to come for me? My gracious!"
"Oh, but I—I—" stammered John.
"You—you? Not a bit of it. She said Jerusha should see me to my door. The old hag's out at the gate now waiting for me. Oh my!"
And Miss Fox fled the premises.
No word ever passed between mother and son about the young lady. It was wholly unnecessary to discuss her. John had been made to see, in a ruthless light, the unseemliness of asking this raw little Westerner to be his mother's successor in the house of Gano, even in these degenerate days.
John's disappointment had no tragic issue, yet, in spite of the consolation of other friends, in spite of the joys of experimental science in the freedom of the woodshed, he was grievously unhappy for a time, especially on Saturday evenings, which he had been used to spend at the Foxes'. Partly in order to have an excuse for breaking through that custom, and partly for a belated doctrinal reason, he occupied his Saturday evenings in taking Hebrew lessons from the Principal of the Boys' Academy. Young Gano had the inquirer's temper, and if he had not had his bread to win, he would probably have been a traveller along many of the roads of learning.
And Valeria—she had not been as successful as her brother in shaking off the paralyzing fears and lulling hopes of the old religious view. But a new passion had found its way into her secluded life, altering, shaping, imperiously governing it. It was no sudden love for the hero of a girlish dream, no dedication of dawning woman-life to the worship of some man, made saint or savior by imagination's magic, no fairy prince's coming, no Romeo calling under her balcony in the night, that wakened this grave-eyed dreamer of dreams to a thrilling sense of life and service. It was that most blessed or accursed summons to rise and join the ranks of those who follow Art. Here in the Western wilds, among conditions grotesquely unpropitious, barren beyond the telling, sordid, if you like, this keen young vision, searching the horizon of a pent-up life, had seen the signal from afar, shining and beckoning her on.
Valeria at nineteen was lamely, impotently following that Will-o'-the-wisp which, under fairest conditions, may "lead to bewilder and dazzle to blind," and of which you shall say in vain, "He lights you to the swamps of death." The happy followers know the swamps of death are waiting all, but many there be who travel thither without the kind-deceiving light.