e, 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?

In her own self-possession she knew that all this was passing rapidly,
that it was not the door now that was still shaking, for it had swung
almost shut again--but it was the windows, the book-shelves, the floor
beneath her feet, that were all shaking. She heard a hurried scrambling,
the trampling of feet below, and the quick rustling of a skirt in the
passage, as if some o