"You do look nice, father," said Val.
John Gano was prematurely old. His untrimmed beard, his bent head with its leonine mane of iron-gray hair, lent him an almost patriarchal look. And yet this man was still in the forties. Such forestalling of old age is no unfamiliar phenomenon in America. He stood by the window drawing on the well-worn left-hand glove; the right, carefully folded, and good almost as new, had been much carried, but never worn.
"I must thin out these maples and dogwoods," he said, with critical eyes on the abundant gold and scarlet foliage in front of the house.
"No, no," protested his mother; "I like something before my windows. Your pruning is too ruthless."
"I can't have the symmetry of the maples interfered with," he said, with great decision.
"Don't be too late to meet Ethan."
"... grown astonishingly!" he ejaculated with pride, as he went off; "and only planted in the fall of '81!"
Val had put her hair up. But there was too much of it; it overweighted the small head. The shifting lights in the unruly waves, and the blue of the eyes, were brought out by the particular shade of navy cloth that she wore—so plainly made that it had the effect of a cunning artifice to show off the lithe figure.
But it was less art than necessity and scarcity of cloth that governed the design. Aunt Valeria had worn it, remodelled to the flamboyant fashion of her day, but it was the identical blue travelling-habit of family legend in which Mrs. Gano, as a girl, made that journey across the Alleghanies in a stage-coach. It was the first time Val had worn it. She was saving it up for New York. The tiny silver disks down the front of the bodice found themselves again, after half a century, buttoning up an eager young body, panting, impatient to cross the mountains from this side, with back to the westering sun, and with bright silver buttons, like bosses on a shield, ready to receive the first dart from out the east.
The party in the parlor were weary enough waiting before An' Jerusha hobbled into the front hall with a negro lad in tow, who brought the news that: