By the afternoon this mist had
disappeared, apparently in the same mysterious manner, but not scattered
by the usual trade-wind, which--another unusual circumstance--that day
was not forthcoming. There was a breathlessness in the air like the
hush of listening expectancy, which filled the young girl with a vague
restlessness, and seemed to even affect a scattered company of crows
in the field beyond the house, which rose suddenly with startled but
aimless wings, and then dropped vacantly among the grain again.
Major Randolph was inspecting a distant part of the ranch, Mrs. Randolph
was presumably engaged in her boudoir, and Rose was sitting between
Adele and Emile before the piano in the drawing-room, listlessly
turning over the leaves of some music. There had been an odd mingling of
eagerness and abstraction in the usual attentions of the young man that
morning, and a certain nervous affectation in his manner of twisting the
ends of a small black moustache, which resembled his mother's eyebrows,
that had affected Rose with a half-amused, half-uneasy consciousness,
but which she had, however, referred to the restlessness produced by the
weather.
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