ite the girls--and the red-headed minx
had placed herself directly across from Creed!

The laughing chains swayed back and forth to the measure of the
music--advancing, retreating, pursuing, evading, choosing, rejecting, in
a gay parody of courtship. Voices were added to that of the fiddle.

"Hit's over the river to feed my sheep,
Hit's over the river to Charley;
Hit's over the river to feed my sheep
An' to kiss my lonesome darling,"

they sang.

Shadows crouched in the corners, flickering, dancing, threatening to come
out and play, then shrinking back as the blaze leaped and the room
widened. The rough brown walls took the shine and broidered themselves
with a thread of golden tracery. In such an illumination the eyes shone
with added luster, flying locks were all hyacinthine, the frocks might
have been silks and satins.

In the movement of the game girls and boys divided. The girls tossed
beribboned heads in unwonted coquetry, yet showed always, in downcast
eyes and the modest management of light draperies, the mountain ideal of
maidenhood. Across from them the line of youthful masculinity swayed;
tall, lean, brown-faced, keen-eyed young hunters these, sinewy and light
and quick of movement, with fine hands and feet, and a lazy pride of
bearing. A very different type from that found in the lowlands, or in
ordinary rustic communities.

Judith noted the other players not at all; her hot reprehending eyes were
on the girl in the blue dress. She did not observe that she herself was
dancing opposite Andy, while Pendrilla Lusk dragged with drooping head in
the line across from the amiably grinning Doss Provine. Finding herself
suddenly in the lead and successful, Huldah began to preen her feathers a
bit. She withdrew a hand from the girl on her right to arrange the small
string of blue glass beads around her neck.

"Jest ketch to my skirt for a minute," she whispered loudly. "I reckon
hit won't rip, though most of 'em is 'stitches taken for a friend'--I was
that anxious to get it done for the party. Oh, Law!"

And then--nobody knew how it happened--she was over the line, her hold on
the hands of her mates broken, she had tripped and fallen in a giggling
blue lawn heap fairly at Bonbright's feet. He was in a position where the
least gallant must offer the salute the game demanded, but to make
assurance doubly sure Huldah put out her hands like a three-year-old,
crying,

"He'p me up, Creed