"Emmeline, hand me that paper."
Trembling, the younger girl brought up the manuscript.
"It isn't honorable to read things that aren't meant for you," said Val, starting up and displacing the blotter.
"Read it!"
Mrs. Gano caught "The Brown House" out of the child's hands with strange excitement, and tore it across and across.
"Oh, oh!" wailed Emmie, with fast-flowing tears, while Val and Ethan stood transfixed.
There was "the magazine" in full sight, flaunting on its cover a splashing red comet with a fiery tail. Mrs. Gano blazed back at it through her glasses as she threw down the fragments of "The Brown House."
"Whose is this?" she said, opening the stitched and folded sheets of her father's ledger.
"Mine," said Val, laying determined hands on the folio.
"I perceive part of it to be unmistakably yours," said Mrs. Gano, with a cutting inflection: "'Vale, a ballad sung at the Grand Opera House by the world-renowned diva, Signorita Val Gano.'"