e of the melody, till she very nearly danced
along. Gaining another glance at him when immediately opposite, she saw
that _one_ of his eyes was open, quizzing her as he smiled at her
emotional state. Her gait could not divest itself of its compelled
capers till she had gone a long way past the house; and Car'line was
unable to shake off the strange infatuation for hours.

After that day, whenever there was to be in the neighbourhood a dance to
which she could get an invitation, and where Mop Ollamoor was to be the
musician, Car'line contrived to be present, though it sometimes involved
a walk of several miles; for he did not play so often in Stickleford as
elsewhere.

The next evidences of his influence over her were singular enough, and it
would require a neurologist to fully explain them. She would be sitting
quietly, any evening after dark, in the house of her father, the parish
clerk, which stood in the middle of Stickleford village street, this
being the highroad between Lower Mellstock and Moreford, five miles
eastward. Here, without a moment's warning, and in the midst of a
general conversation between her father, sister, and the young man before
alluded to, who devotedly wooed her in ignorance of her infatuation, she
would start from her seat in the chimney-corner as if she had received a
galvanic shock, and spring convulsively towards the ceiling; then she
would burst into tears, and it was not till some half-hour had passed
that she grew calm as usual. Her father, knowing her hysterical
tendencies, was always excessively anxious about this trait in his
youngest girl, and feared the attack to be a species of epileptic fit.
Not so her sister Julia. Julia had found Out what was the cause. At the
moment before the jumping, only an exceptionally sensitive ear situated
in the chimney-nook could have caught from down the flue the beat of a
man's footstep along the highway without. But it was in that footfall,
for which she had been waiting, that the origin of Car'line's involuntary
springing lay. The pedestrian was Mop Ollamoor, as the girl well knew;
but his business that way was not to visit her; he sought another woman
whom he spoke of as his Intended, and who lived at Moreford, two miles
farther on. On one, and only one, occasion did it happen that Car'line
could not control her utterance; it was when her sister alone chanced to
be present. 'Oh--oh--oh--!' she cried. 'He's going to _her_, and not
com