ricate and marvelous variety.

"Stop moving your feet!" whispered Annette. "You'll step on my dress."

"Is it the mazurka that's got the hiccoughs in the middle?" asked
Sandy, anxiously.

Mr. Meech paused and looked at them over his spectacles in plaintive
reproach.

Then he wandered on into sixthlies and seventhlies of increasing
length. Before the final amen had died upon the air, Annette and Sandy
had escaped to their reward.

The hop was given in the town hall, a large, dreary-looking room with
a raised platform at one end, where Johnson's band introduced
instruments and notes that had never met before.

To Sandy it was a hall of Olympus, where filmy-robed goddesses moved
to the music of the spheres.

"Isn't the floor g-grand?" cried Annette, with a little run and a
slide. "I could just d-die dancing."

"What may the chalk line be for?" asked Sandy.

"That's to keep the stags b-back."

"The stags?" His spirits fell before this new complication.

"Yes; the boys without partners, you know. They have to stay b-back of
the chalk line and b-break in from there. You'll catch on right away.
There's your d-dressing-room over there. Don't bother about my card;
it's been filled a week. Is there anyb-body you want to dance with
especially?"

Sandy's eyes answered for him. They were held by a vision in the
center of the room, and he was blinded to everything else.

Half surrounded by a little group stood Ruth Nelson, red-lipped,
bright-eyed, eager, her slender white-clad figure on tiptoe with
buoyant expectancy. The crimson rose caught in her hair kept impatient
time to the tap of her restless high-heeled slipper, and she swayed
and sang with the music in a way to set the sea-waves dancing.

It was small matter to Sandy that the lace on her dress had belonged
to her great-grandmother, or that the pearls about her round white
throat had been worn by an ancestor who was lady in waiting to a queen
of France. He only knew she meant everything beautiful in the world to
him,--music and springtime and dawn,--and that when she smiled it was
sunlight in his heart.

"I don't think you can g-get a dance there," said Annette, following
his gaze. "She is always engaged ahead. But I'll find out, if you
w-want me to."

"Would you, now?" cried Sandy, fervently pressing her hand. Then he
stopped short. "Annette," he said wistfully, "do you think she'll be
caring to dance with a boy like me?"

"Of course she will, if you k