He stayed with his uncle for a month, and then sent for the despised Drouet, who was an excellent nurse. As he grew weaker, John Gano developed not only a tolerance, but a liking, for the alert, amusing Frenchman, and stayed contentedly in the quarters Ethan had found, until the spring, making a herbarium of the flora of that region. At the beginning of May he was to return home. Early in April, Drouet wired to his master in Boston to say that the doctor was alarmed at the patient's condition. Ethan went South at once, and three days after his arrival his uncle died in his arms.
"Don't drag me back to the North," he had said; "bury me where I fall." And it was done.
Mrs. Gano was too ill to travel, and telegraphed that Ethan was to come back afterwards to the Fort.
It was a very different arrival from the last. The little cousins, dressed in black, looked more than ever like snow flowers on the fringe of winter.
Mrs. Gano was profoundly moved on seeing Ethan entering alone. She motioned the children out of the room, and had one long talk with her grandson about the end. Afterwards, in her fashion when she was suffering most, she shut herself up, and no one except the servants saw her until the following Sunday, which was Easter.
It struck Ethan as curious, and unexpected, that even the girls should put such restraint upon their grief. Emmie, it was true, was often seen in tears, but the most she ever said of her father was, "He knows there's a heaven now." Val conducted the household in default of her grandmother, and Ethan caught himself smiling surreptitiously at the old-fashioned decorum she imposed upon herself in playing the unaccustomed rôle.
Emmie was to be confirmed this Easter. She was going through a very devout phase, and, when Val was not there, she talked to Ethan about the coming consecration with a curious religious fervor. There was a strain of unconscious mysticism in the girl that struck Ethan oddly, against the bare American background. It was to him more of an anachronism than any manifestation he had yet encountered, even at the Fort, that stronghold of the past.
"I love to talk about these things to you, cousin Ethan," she said; "Val doesn't understand."
Learning something of these confidences, Mrs. Gano took the first opportunity of saying, privately:
"I do not know quite where you stand, my dear Ethan, in matters of religious faith—" and she waited.