The Open Question Part 50

They studied the picture for some moments held between them.

"Do you quite like his chin?" pursued Emmie.

"I like that best of all except his nose," said Val, firmly.

"Oh, what makes you like his _nose_?"

"Because it isn't too little, and because it's rather bony, and because it's got a bridge."

"Oh, well, I think I'd prefer it quite straight instead of aquiline. But he's very handsome. It's nice having him look like that."

Emmie held the photograph off, and tilted her head from side to side.

"Grandma says cousin Ethan and me used to be rather alike as children."

She smiled contentedly. "I hope he'll go to church."

She took the picture back presently, but before she replaced it on the mantel-piece she looked round over her shoulder. Rea.s.sured, she kissed the pasteboard fervently, and put it down with shamefaced, fluttering haste.

The sun set and the light faded. Still no Ethan. A brief interval for supper at six, and the three returned to the parlor. Mrs. Gano manifested a hitherto unsuspected leaning towards illumination. The branch candlesticks, for the first time within the memory of man, held each its triple flame, and a shaded lamp shed a crimson glow over the centre table. She made an excursion into the hall, and complained that the Moorish lamp burned faint and insufficiently. She came back, saying:

"It will seem cold after France," and with her own hands she lit the ready-laid fire in the grate. Later, she went to the front door and objected to the absence of the moon.

"It's really dangerous coming up those steps in the pitch-dark, especially since the second stone was broken."

At half-past eight she shut her book suddenly.

"Val, couldn't you get your father's new-fangled lantern--that patent incandescent contrivance--and set it lighted at the top of the steps?"

"Y-yes, ma'am, if you think it won't look funny. It's like the head-light of an engine."

"Funny? Not at all. There's nothing your cousin Ethan dislikes so much as the dark--unless he's greatly altered."

So Val got the lantern, and set it where the wide diverging rays flared out across the street, as a fan of zodiacal light opens gaudily across the Milky Way on arctic nights, leaving travellers on the ways of this world but little illumined, for all the glory of heaven.

So with the patent incandescent lantern. It picked out the whitewashed hitching-post with an ostentation of good-will, flooded the farther side of the street, and fell with a kind of fierce satisfaction upon the ugly new wooden tenements opposite. But this side, gutter, and gate, and little flight of worn and broken steps, were left in denser darkness.

Val came in, complaining for the first time at the delay.

"I hope poor father isn't waiting all these hours for his supper."

"Oh, he'll go to the hotel, you may be sure."

Mrs. Gano did not speak as if the thought brought her particular satisfaction.

"It's getting cold; I just wish he'd come home. I don't believe there's the least use expecting cousin Ethan before to-morrow."

But when Emmie, half an hour later, asked for serious advice:

"Now, _do_ you think I'd have time to eat another apple before he comes?"

"I wouldn't risk it," said Val; "we'll tell fortunes with the seeds you've got already."

The two girls sat on the moth-eaten velvet sofa. Emmie had spread her apple-seeds out on last evening's _Mioto Gazette_, and rubbed her fruity fingers on a diminutive pocket-handkerchief.

"Now I've named them," she said, in a whisper.

Val pointed at random:

"One I love, two I love, three I love, I say; Four I love with all my heart, five I cast away; Six he loves, seven she loves, eight they both love; Nine he comes, ten he tarries, Eleven he courts--"

"Oh," sighed Emmie, "only one more needed."

She rumpled up the paper, and with a glance towards her grandmother she thrust it behind the sofa.

"Pig!" remonstrated Val, under her breath, for once on the side of law and order.

"Ain't a pig. I shall see what my new shoe-b.u.t.tons say," Emmie whispered. "Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant. Ha! going to be a chieftess. Now what shall I wear? Silk, satin, calico, cotton," and on till she was able to announce, with dark eyes glancing and full of glee: "Satin!"

"You cheated. You haven't any right to count the one that's off."

"Course I have. They're brand-new shoes, and the b.u.t.tons haven't any right to come off first time. And it's _goin'_ to be satin--green satin, bright, beautiful gra.s.s-green satin. Now I'll tell _your_ fortune," she added, amiably.

But Val sprang up, crying:

"He's come."

There was the rattle of wheels, at all events, in the quiet side street.

The two girls rushed to the door and down to the gate. A carriage stopped. Their father got out with his usual air of weary haste. He was saying something disparaging of that Europe he had never seen, applauding his nephew's return to his native land. Val, her grandmother's warning fresh in mind, caught up the lantern and held it high above her head, slanted slightly, so as to catch within the radius of light the tall, slight figure that followed her father so lightly up the broken steps.

"Your own country has need of you," John Gano was winding up; "she is waiting for just such a man."

He paused under the red-bud tree.

Val still stood with the lantern conscientiously held up, lost for that first moment in her own absorbing impressions. Young Gano looked at her with quick realization of the eager, buoyant att.i.tude, the uplifted face on which the strong light streamed, the wide, earnest outlook of eyes with so much more in them of question than of welcome, they might have been accustomed to sweeping far horizons from the watch-towers of the world.

An infinitesimal pause, and then:

"How do you do, America?" he said, smiling, and took his cousin's hand.

Val felt instantly he was laughing at her for a kind of travesty of Liberty Enlightening the World. She drew back quickly, lowering the lantern.

"I am Val," she said, "and this is Emmie."

The younger girl held up her pretty face, and her cousin kissed her.

"Where's grandmamma?" he said, eagerly, as he looked up.