So Orient stepped slowly down, adjusting her bracelets as she went. She saw Reymund a second, as the winding way of the stairs for that space allowed her, standing in the bay-window and looking out. She did not know what made her so hesitate to enter. She paused a moment longer in the doorway, gazing in. The room was very gay with bunches of deep-blue and scarlet salvia, and drooping clusters of barberry boughs stringing their splendid pendants all along most graceful curves; but there was another brightness than that in the room. It was where Reymund stood in the embrasure of the window, with the late sunlight falling all over him. She wondered that he did not advance to meet her; but, as she wondered, went up the room toward him. “Something must have happened to make him very happy,” thought Orient. “I never saw such a smile!” Perhaps it was this smile that so transfigured him; a plain man commonly, the sunshine now seemed to bring out rich, dark tints on the countenance, the eyes overflowed with light, and whether it were grace of posture, overlying sunshine, or beaming smile, features and face and figure expressed a subtle harmony, and the man was beautiful,--beautiful as a strong angel pictured in some instant of stooping flight. “He does not mean to speak till I do,” thought Orient again. But as she drew near, the smile changed to a look of utter melancholy, as a shining cloud melts into rain,--a melancholy gaze that pierced her through and through. She put out her hand, nevertheless, to take his extended grasp. And there was nothing there! In the same instant, with a loud and terrible voice, crying, “Orient!”--a voice as if it were the voice of death, the tomb, and all corruption,--the thing had vanished; the place was empty! That cry rang through the house, that loud and terrible voice. Maid and mother rushed into the room; and they found no one there but Orient, fallen unconscious to the floor. It did not take long to revive the child. “Something has happened to Reymund,” she said, upon lifting her head. “We must go to him at once!” “My love!” cried her mother. “The idea of the thing. The--” But expostulations were wasted breath; while they were being made, Orient was calmly getting on her travelling-gown, and, seeing herself powerless, the mother--with her heart palpitating in the ends of her fingers through awe and through alarm, and interweaving with the ejaculations that escaped her chattering teeth a thousand instructions to her quaking maid and sister--hastened to do likewise and be off with her. Thus it happened that the telegram from Reymund’s brother crossed the travellers on their way; and they reached his brother’s house in the gray of the shivering morning.