oked fiery hot; a handsome boy,
with blue eyes and a little golden down on the upper lip of his sunny
red-cheeked face. Edward Pierson thought: 'Nice couple!' And had a
moment's vision of himself and Leila, dancing at that long-ago Cambridge
May Week--on her seventeenth birthday, he remembered, so that she must
have been a year younger than Nollie was now! This would be the young
man she had talked of in her letters during the last three weeks. Were
they never going to stop?

He passed into view of those within, and said:

"Aren't you very hot, Nollie?"

She blew him a kiss; the young man looked startled and self-conscious,
and Eve called out:

"It's a bet, Uncle. They've got to dance me down."

Pierson said mildly:

"A bet? My dears!"

Noel murmured over her shoulder:

"It's all right, Daddy!" And the young man gasped:

"She's bet us one of her puppies against one of mine, sir!"

Pierson sat down, a little hypnotized by the sleepy strumming, the slow
giddy movement of the dancers, and those half-closed swimming eyes of
his young daughter, looking at him over her shoulder as she went by. He
sat with a smile on his lips. Nollie was growing up! Now that Gratian
was married, she had become a great responsibility. If only his dear
wife had lived! The smile faded from his lips; he looked suddenly very
tired. The struggle, physical and spiritual, he had been through, these
fifteen years, sometimes weighed him almost to the ground: Most men
would have married again, but he had always felt it would be sacrilege.
Real unions were for ever, even though the Church permitted remarriage.

He watched his young daughter with a mixture of aesthetic pleasure and
perplexity. Could this be good for her? To go on dancing indefinitely
with one young man could that possibly be good for her? But they looked
very happy; and there was so much in young creatures that he did
not understand. Noel, so affectionate, and dreamy, seemed sometimes
possessed of a little devil. Edward Pierson was naif; attributed those
outbursts of demonic possession to the loss of her mother when she was
such a mite; Gratian, but two years older, had never taken a mother's
place. That had been left to himself, and he was more or less conscious
of failure.

He sat there looking up at her with a sort of whimsical distress. And,
suddenly, in that dainty voice of hers, which seemed to spurn each word
a little, she said:

"I'm going to stop!" and, sitting do