jingling load slipped
along the snowy road to the tavern that night, and the ball-room
filled rapidly.

At eight o'clock the ball opened. Madelon stood up in the little
gallery allotted to the violins and lilted, and the march began. Two
and two, the young men and the girls swung around the room. Madelon
lilted with her eyes upon the moving throng, gay as a garden in a
wind; and suddenly her heart stood still, although she lilted on.
Down on the floor below Burr Gordon led the march, with Dorothy Fair
on his arm. Dorothy Fair, waving a great painted fan with the
tremulous motion of a butterfly's wing, with her blue brocade
petticoat tilting airily as she moved, like an inverted bell-flower,
with a locket set in brilliants flashing on her white neck, with her
pink-and-white face smiling out with gentle gayety from her fair
curls, stepped delicately, pointing out her blue satin toes, around
the ball-room, with one little white hand on Burr Gordon's arm.

Chapter III

Suddenly all Madelon's beauty was cheapened in her own eyes. She saw
herself swart and harsh-faced as some old savage squaw beside this
fair angel. She turned on herself as well as on her recreant lover
with rage and disdain--and all the time she lilted without one break.

The ball swung on and on, and Madelon, up in the musicians' gallery,
sang the old country-dances in the curious dissyllabic fashion termed
lilting. It never occurred to her to wonder how it was that Dorothy
Fair, the daughter of the orthodox minister, should be at the
ball--she who had been brought up to believe in the sinful and
hellward tendencies of the dance. Madelon only grasped the fact that
she was there with Burr; but others wondered, and the surprise had
been great when Dorothy in her blue brocade had appeared in the
ball-room.

This had been largely of late years a liberal and Unitarian village,
but Parson Fair had always held stanchly to his stern orthodox
tenets, and promulgated them undiluted before his thinning
congregations and in his own household. Dorothy could not only not
play cards or dance, but she could not be present at a party where
the cards were produced or the fiddle played. There was, indeed, a
rumor that she had learned to dance when she was in Boston at school,
but no one knew for certain.

Dorothy Fair was advancing daintily between the two long lines,
holding up her blue brocade to clear her blue-satin shoes, to meet
the young man from the o