and girls dancing. There were so
many of them that she could not count them. She thought that they
seemed to be a little younger and smaller than herself. The boys all
wore green jackets and red caps. When she looked at them more closely
she could not tell whether they were boys at all or not. They looked
more like old men. And she could scarcely believe that either, because
they danced so fast and seemed so lively. Her father could not dance
like that, she was sure, and he was not an old man.

But she had no doubt that the girls were girls. Usually she could not
tell a pretty girl from an ugly one, any more than any other girl can,
but she knew that these were pretty. Anybody would. They had long,
golden hair that hung all loose and free and came down to their knees,
when the little wind did not blow it away in some other direction.
They had deep, soft eyes. They were dressed in long, white gowns, so
white that they shone, now like a sheet of pale light and now with a
hundred little sparkles, as the water of the sea does sometimes, when
it is broken into foam by the prow of a ship. All the men carried
lanterns and all the girls had something that looked like long
flower-stems, only there were tiny lights on the ends of them, instead
of flowers. These and the lanterns did not seem to trouble them at all
in dancing, and if Kathleen had seen the lights and had not seen the
dancers, she would have thought that they were a swarm of fireflies.

She had scarcely stood there for a minute before one of the men came
up to her and asked her to dance with him. Kathleen's first thought
was that she ought to be afraid, and her second thought was that she
was not afraid a bit. She liked dancing and she had just been wishing
that she could dance with these boys and girls. Then she wondered if
it was quite right. Then she could not see what there could be wrong
about it. Then she let the little man take her hand and she stepped
off the path upon the grass and began to dance. She heard the other
girls calling to her again, farther up the path. She called back to
them: "I am coming in a minute! Wait for me!" And then she went on
dancing.

When she had been only looking on, the dancing had seemed to Kathleen
to be quite wonderful, but now she found that she could do it all
nearly as well as the little boys and girls. She thought that it might
be because the little old man was a better partner for dancing than
she had ever had before. T