He disappeared. Rose got up and moved uneasily towards the window. “How queer and quiet it looks outside. It's really too bad that he should be sent after that fan again. He'll never find it.” She resumed her place at the piano, Adele following her with round, expectant eyes. After a pause she started up again. “I'll go and fetch it myself,” she said, with a half-embarrassed laugh, and ran to the door. Scarcely understanding her own nervousness, but finding relief in rapid movement, Rose flew lightly up the staircase. The major's study, where she had been writing letters, during his absence, that morning, was at the further end of a long passage, and near her own bedroom, the door of which, as she passed, she noticed, half-abstractedly, was open, but she continued on and hurriedly entered the study. At the same moment Emile, with a smile on his face, turned towards her with the fan in his hand. “Oh, you've found it,” she said, with nervous eagerness. “I was so afraid you'd have all your trouble for nothing.” She extended her hand, with a half-breathless smile, for the fan, but he caught her outstretched little palm in his own, and held it. “Ah! but you are not going to leave us, are you?” In a flash of consciousness she understood him, and, as it seemed to her, her own nervousness, and all, and everything. And with it came a swift appreciation of all it meant to her and her future. To be always with him and like him, a part of this refined and restful seclusion--akin to all that had so attracted her in this house; not to be obliged to educate herself up to it, but to be in it on equal terms at once; to know that it was no wild, foolish youthful fancy, but a wise, thoughtful, and prudent resolve, that her father would understand and her friends respect: these were the thoughts that crowded quickly upon her, more like an explanation of her feelings than a revelation, in the brief second that he held her hand. It was not, perhaps, love as she had dreamed it, and even BELIEVED it, before. She was not ashamed or embarrassed; she even felt, with a slight pride, that she was not blushing. She raised her eyes frankly. What she WOULD have said she did not know, for the door, which he had closed behind her, began to shake violently. It was not the fear of some angry intrusion or interference surely that made him drop her hand instantly. It was not--her second thought--the idea that some one had fallen in a fit against it that blanched his face with abject and unreasoning terror! It must have been something else that caused him to utter an inarticulate cry and dash out of the room and down the stairs like a madman! What had happened?