Julia noticed that Mr. Gano made no effort to get Val to sing, and she fell to imagining what his feelings had been when he found that he had silenced that wonderful voice. She went home full of secret pain and irritation—irritation at Tom Scherer because—well, because he was not Ethan Gano; pain at finding how the old feeling she had thought dead had sprung up quick, tormenting, under the careless glance of those sombre eyes.
Almost every morning she resolved to go no more to the Fort; almost every evening saw the resolution broken.
If, in the days that followed, Julia's odd footing in the house was not discouraged by Val's proud tolerance, it was maintained by an attitude on Ethan's part, entirely friendly, sometimes even flattering. With Scherer, too, he was on the best of terms. Scherer, immensely pleased at Gano's liking for his society, was ready to smoke and talk politics or literature till two in the morning. He could sit in court all day, play tennis or sing songs in the evening, and again sit up half the night.
"Do men always need outsiders? Is a wife never enough? Still, it isn't Scherer I mind," Val said, honestly enough, to herself, "although he is beginning to echo and imitate Ethan absurdly."
The real trouble was that they went almost nowhere without Julia. It was Julia and Ethan who one day, when Val was confined to her room with a cold, arranged the steamboat excursions up and down the Mioto.
Val, lying in bed in the blue room, heard them laughing down on the back veranda.
Ethan came up-stairs an hour or so later.
"Oh, you're awake!"
"Well, yes; it isn't likely I'd sleep with all that noise."