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PAGE 12

Through The Santa Clara Wheat
by [?]

“But you don’t know where it is!”

“I shall find it by instinct.”

“You are spoiling me–you two.” The parenthesis was a hesitating addition, but she continued, with fresh sincerity, “I shall be quite helpless when I leave here–if I am ever able to go by myself.”

“Don’t ever go, then.”

“But just now I want my fan; it is so close everywhere to-day.”

“I fly, mademoiselle.”

He started to the door.

She called after him:–

“Let me help your instinct, then; I had it last in the major’s study.”

“That was where I was going.”

He disappeared. Rose got up and moved uneasily towards the window. “How queer and quiet it looks outside. It’s really too bad that he should be sent after that fan again. He’ll never find it.” She resumed her place at the piano, Adele following her with round, expectant eyes. After a pause she started up again. “I’ll go and fetch it myself,” she said, with a half-embarrassed laugh, and ran to the door.

Scarcely understanding her own nervousness, but finding relief in rapid movement, Rose flew lightly up the staircase. The major’s study, where she had been writing letters, during his absence, 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 one had precipitately fled from her room. Yet no one had called to her–even HE had said nothing. Whatever had happened they clearly had not cared for her to know.