ooked curiously at his red, excited face. She followed him in
silence down the stairs.

Sheila stood still listening to their descending steps, then she knelt
down beside her little trunk and opened the lid. The sound of the fiddle
stole hauntingly, beseechingly, tauntingly into her consciousness. There
in the top tray of her trunk wrapped in tissue paper lay the only evening
frock she had, a filmy French dress of white tulle, a Christmas present
from her father, a breath-taking, intoxicating extravagance. She had worn
it only once.

It was with the strangest feeling that she took it out. It seemed to her
that the Sheila that had worn that dress was dead.

CHAPTER IX

A SINGEING OF WINGS

All the vitality of Millings--and whatever its deficiencies the town
lacked nothing of the splendor and vigor of its youth--throbbed and
stamped and shook the walls of the Town Hall that night. To understand
that dance, it is necessary to remember that it took place on a February
night with the thermometer at zero and with the ground five feet beneath
the surface of the snow. There were men and women and children, too, who
had come on skis and in toboggans for twenty miles from distant ranches
to do honor to the wedding-anniversary of Greely and his wife.

A room near the ballroom was reserved for babies, and here, early in the
evening, lay small bundles in helpless, more or less protesting, rows,
their needs attended to between waltzes and polkas by father or mother
according to the leisure of the parent and the nature of the need. One
infant, whose home discipline was not up to the requirements of this
event, refused to accommodate himself to loneliness and so spent the
evening being dandled, first by father, then by mother, in a chair
immediately beside the big drum. Whether the spot was chosen for the
purpose of smothering his cries or enlivening his spirits nobody cared
to inquire. Infants in the Millings and Hidden Creek communities, where
certified milk and scientific feeding were unknown, were treated rather
like family parasites to be attended to only when the irritation they
caused became acute. They were not taken very seriously. That they grew
up at all was largely due to their being turned out as soon as they could
walk into an air that buoyed the entire nervous and circulatory systems
almost above the need of any other stimulant.

The dance began when the first guests arrived, which on this occasion was
at