‘I daresay she’s just fretting a bit after you.’ Roger’s heart bounded, and fell again. It could not be so. Ada knew she needed not to fret after him. But he said, as cheerfully as he could— ‘I’ll go upstairs and find her.’ With which he went through the shop into the passage, and quickly up the stairs. As he ascended, the ‘wailing’ of which Mr. Dixon had complained became distinctly audible. It was a very, very mournful song that Ada sang, and Roger’s heart died within him as he heard it. He opened the parlour door softly, and looked in. The piano was opposite to the door; therefore Ada, seated at it, had her back turned towards him. She had ceased to play within the last minute, and sat very still, with her hands, he noticed, dropping down at her sides, in a way that had something very painful and hopeless about it. His heart went out to her, and as she did not at first appear to notice any sound or any footstep, he walked softly up behind her; but not so softly, big and heavy as he was, and unused to treading gingerly, but that she could hear him distinctly; and he noticed that she suddenly drew her hands up, and that they were clenched, and that her shoulders heaved, as if she drew a deep breath—not as if she were surprised, Roger thought, hope beginning to beat high in his heart again, _but rather as if she were very glad_. She knew, then, that he was there. She recognised his footstep, and she was moved, deeply moved, by his presence. He laid his hands upon her shoulders, and said, softly and caressingly— ‘Ada!’ She faced him, with the quickness of lightning, and with a veritable shriek,—it was too loud, too affrighted to be called an exclamation—and Roger recoiled before the expression of the face which was turned towards him. He literally fell back a step or two, gazing at her alarmed and speechless, while she put her hands, one to either side of her head, and shrank together, staring at him with a look of terror and amaze. ‘Ada, my love,’ he began at last, alarmed and bewildered by the contradiction between her manner before she had seen him, and that manner now that she beheld him. Then she found her voice, and rose from the music stool. ‘Roger, Roger!’ she gasped. ‘How can you! Stealing up behind one, and startling one in that way! It’s enough to turn the head, if one’s a nervous person.’ ‘But, my darling, I saw that you heard me,’ he began; but she burst into hysterical tears, turning away from him, and flinging herself upon a sofa, so that he saw it was useless to attempt to explain or apologise. Once it crossed his mind, ‘She behaves almost as if she had expected some one else.’ Then he put the idea aside, as we do put ideas aside which we know would be absurd in regard to ourselves, often without stopping to make allowances for the differences in others’ minds and our own.