If he was unconscious of any change in her enlivening influence in the days following, it did not escape Mrs. Gano that Val's humor was more capricious than her family had been accustomed to find it. The old on-looker at the game could not, of course, know that alone with Ethan the girl was embarrassed, breathless, almost terrified, and yet deliciously happy. She was no sooner alone with him than she wanted to run away—no sooner had she run away than she wanted to go back. When he was present, she was often in the wildest spirits; when he went out of the room, he seemed to take her soul away with him. She sat silent, helpless, till he came again. She seemed to have lost her hitherto unfailing gusto for games and outings. She saw as little as possible of Julia and of Harry Wilbur. She did her lessons absent-mindedly, and was not much heard from in the general family talks. Val! Who had never found it possible before to realize that young people should be seen and not heard! Mrs. Gano had not lived seventy years in the world for nothing. She saw enough of the state of affairs to feel sore at heart for the poor foolish little girl, who was groping her way through her first great initiation into the mystery of mysteries.
For all Mrs. Gano's pride in, and affection for, Ethan, she felt scant patience at his lingering on at the Fort, amusing himself with Val's oddities and adorations, carelessly absorbing her generous capacity for hero-worship, building himself a shrine in her imagination before turning his back upon the Fort, perhaps for another twenty years. It was plain to Mrs. Gano that Ethan was a person exercising no little fascination upon womankind; equally plain was it that the school-girl worship of his little country cousin was in the nature of a smiling incident that could not arrest him long.
"What an absurd infant you are!" she had heard him exclaim.
"I'm not in the very least like an infant," Val had retorted.
"Well, you are quite the youngest person I've ever known," he assured her.
As Val sat at her lessons in the long room of a morning, Mrs. Gano had no need to look out herself to see, or to ask, who was passing under her windows. If, at the morning's end, the door behind them opened, she saw in Val's face if it were Ethan coming in. Old Jerusha was right—the face was like a lamp, and like an open book the young heart underneath its light.
"John," said Mrs. Gano, at the beginning of the next week, "has Ethan told you how long he means to stay?"
"No."