Ralph sprang forward with his hands extended.
"Ah, ha, my lady-bird, with all this fluttering I have found you!"
There was a quick rush behind the drapery, which shook and swayed, till the dust fell from it in showers. Again Ralph laughed, "Ah, lapwing, struggle away, I have you safe."
He seized an armful of the damask drapery as he spoke, and felt a slight form struggling and trembling in his embrace. Instinctively his arms relaxed their hold, and with something akin to terror, he whispered:—
"Why, Lina, darling, what is this? I thought that we loved each other. You did not tremble so, when I held you in my arms yesterday!"
A smothered cry, as of acute pain, broke from beneath the drapery, and then, while Ralph stood lost in surprise, the curtains fell rustling together, and the faint sound of a door cautiously closed, admonished him that he was alone.
"Lina, dear Lina," he called, reluctant to believe that she had left him so abruptly.
There was no answer, not even a rustle of the damask.
He was alone. When satisfied of this, the young man found his way to the light again. But for the terror and evident recoil of the person who had evaded him, he would have considered the whole adventure a capital joke, in which he had been famously baffled; but there was something too earnest in that struggle and cry for trifling, and the remembrance left him with a heart-ache.
When Ralph came back to the breakfast-table, he found Lina seated in his mother's place. A faint color came into her cheek as she saw him, but otherwise she was calm and thoughtful. Nay, there was a shade of sorrow upon her countenance, but nothing of the flush and tumult that would naturally have followed the encounter from which she was so fresh.