The Hotel Venat that night closed its doors upon many anxious and troubled souls. A certain agitation seemed to have crept through the house itself. The landlady was disturbed in her bureau, moving about restlessly, giving short answers to the many inquirers who came to know what was the matter. “What is there, do you ask?” she said, stretching out her plump hands, “there is nothing! there is that mademoiselle, the young _Anglaise_, has an _attaque des nerfs_. Nothing could be more simple. The reason I know not. Is it necessary to inquire? An affair of the heart! _Les Anglaises_ have two or three in a year. Mademoiselle has had a disappointment. The uncle has come to interfere, and she has a seizure. I do not blame her; it is the weapon of a young girl. What has she else, _pauvre petite_, to avenge herself?” “But, madame, they say that something has been seen--a ghost, a--” “There are no ghosts in my house,” the indignant landlady said; and her tone was so imperious and her brow so lowering that the timid questioners scattered in all directions. The English visitors were not quite sure what an _attaque des nerfs_ was. It was not a “nervous attack;” it was something not to be defined by English terms. English ladies do not have hysterics nowadays; they have neuralgia, which answers something of the same purpose, but then neuralgia has no sort of connection with ghosts. In Mrs. Lennox’s sitting-room up-stairs, which was so well lighted, so fully occupied, with large windows opening upon the garden, and white curtains fluttering at the open windows, a very agitated group was assembled. Mrs. Lennox was seated at a distance from the table, with her white handkerchief in her hand, with which now and then she wiped off a few tears. Sometimes she would throw a word into the conversation that was going on, but for the most part confined herself to passive remonstrances and appeals, lifting up now her hands, now her eyes, to heaven. It was half because she was so overcome by her feelings that Mrs. Lennox took so little share in what was going on, and half because her brother had taken the management of this crisis off her hands. She did not think that he showed much mastery of the situation, but she yielded it to him with a great and consolatory consciousness that, whatever should now happen, _she_ could not be held as the person to blame.