r suddenly to the end
that he might turn the key in Jack's door; then he took her by the hand
and led her to the chair where he had been sitting. It was one of those
vast and luxurious _fauteuils_ which have prevented the Old World from
ever importing the rocker. He installed her in its depth and placed
himself upon the broad and cushioned arm.

"_Mon Dieu, que je suis heureux!_" he said, smiling down into her eyes;
"_alors tu m'aimes vraiment_?"

"Jack told me that you were terribly ill," she said, her eyes resting
upon his face with a sort of overwhelming content.

"And you have care?"

"I thought that I should lose my mind!"

"_Ma cherie!_"

"But you really look as if you had been ill?"

"Not ill, but most _malheureux_. It has not been easy always to wait and
believe that you shall love me yet."

"But you always did believe it?"

He smiled his irresistible smile of eyes and lip.

"Your cousin has said to me in Tagernsee, 'She will certainly marry you
because she declares that she will not, and she always does do exactly
_le contraire_;' but, _Mon Dieu_, how could I trust to that?"

Rosina laughed ringingly.

"Dear Jack! I wish that I had known myself as well as he knows me."

"He has been very good to me," said Von Ibn, leaning above her and
breaking his sentences in a manner that was perhaps only natural, all
things considered; "he has kept me from--the real madness. But for him I
was quite willing to shoot myself. It has never been anything so
terrible for me as--when you enter the door of the _pension_ that night
and shut it between us."

She lifted up her hand and closed his big eyes with its soft touch.

"I loved you in Lucerne," she declared to his blindness, "that first
moment when I saw you walking on the Quai. I did not know why, but I
felt that I _must_ know you."

He snatched her hand away and laughed.

"_Voila!_" he exclaimed; "what have I say to you that time in Munich,
that the women are always _genees_! You love in Lucerne, and insist not
for all the summer after."

Then they laughed together.

"Would you have liked me to have told you there on the Quai? would you
have believed it?"

"Yes," he said gravely; "I would have believed it very well, because I
also knew the same. In the hotel I had seen you, and on the Promenade I
said myself, '_Voila la jolie Americaine encore une fois!_' You see!"

She wondered how she had ever for a moment thought that his eyes were
melancholy,