For the phase-to-phase short circuit fault occurred in transmission lines without shunt reactor, a method of adaptive sequential reclosure is proposed in this paper. A circuit model is built for analyzing the phase-to-phase short circuit fault, and the time domain expression of terminal voltage is deduced for the open-phase at different stages of transient fault. The recovery voltage characters of terminal voltage at open-phase is analyzed in detail. The theoretical analysis shows that the phase angle difference of terminal voltage at open-phase changes suddenly from -120° to 180° in the moment of arc extinction, and the decaying DC component appears obviously in the recovery voltage after the arc extinction. According to the above characteristics of terminal voltage at open-phase, a criterion was proposed to detect the arc extinction time and realize the adaptive sequential reclosure of transmission line. The simulations verified the correctness of the analysis result and the validity of the proposed method.