"I can see Cassiopeia," Val would observe, just to show that she was not quite out of it.
And she would grasp her father's hand tighter, to remind him of their agreement that the straggling W stood for "We"—Val and her father. Then he would find Lyra and the Little Bear, and tell how the Milky Way, instead of being, as Hiawatha and Val had thought, "pathway of the ghosts and shadows," was really star-dust, the scattered nebulæ of other suns and systems.
Mrs. Gano would look back before going in-doors, and say, with solemn upward gaze:
"Yes, yes! 'An undevout astronomer is mad.'"
Then they would go in silently to bed.
CHAPTER XII
A letter by the late post from cousin Ethan! It would be the last before he himself would appear. Emmie watched, with luminous eyes, her grandmother's opening of the envelope. Val, in banishment, waited impatiently outside in the dusk on the stairs to hear the news; but the face of the reader in the long room darkened as she read. She dropped the letter in her lap at the close, speechless.
"Oh! what is it, gran'ma?" quivered the sympathetic Emmie.