waves of light against the whitewashed walls, and
the iron flanks of the stove at the end of the hall looked as though
they were heaving with volcanic fires. The floor was thronged with
girls and young men. Down the side wall facing the window stood a row of
kitchen chairs from which the older women had just risen. By this time
the music had stopped, and the musicians--a fiddler, and the young lady
who played the harmonium on Sundays--were hastily refreshing themselves
at one corner of the supper-table which aligned its devastated
pie-dishes and ice-cream saucers on the platform at the end of the hall.
The guests were preparing to leave, and the tide had already set toward
the passage where coats and wraps were hung, when a young man with a
sprightly foot and a shock of black hair shot into the middle of
the floor and clapped his hands. The signal took instant effect.
The musicians hurried to their instruments, the dancers--some already
half-muffled for departure--fell into line down each side of the room,
the older spectators slipped back to their chairs, and the lively young
man, after diving about here and there in the throng, drew forth a girl
who had already wound a cherry-coloured "fascinator" about her head,
and, leading her up to the end of the floor, whirled her down its length
to the bounding tune of a Virginia reel.

Frome's heart was beating fast. He had been straining for a glimpse
of the dark head under the cherry-coloured scarf and it vexed him that
another eye should have been quicker than his. The leader of the reel,
who looked as if he had Irish blood in his veins, danced well, and his
partner caught his fire. As she passed down the line, her light figure
swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf
flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each
turn, caught sight of her laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair
about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points
in a maze of flying lines.

The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep
up with them, belaboured their instruments like jockeys lashing their
mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window
that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the
girl's face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the
dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership. Denis Eady was
the son of Mic