together. A lifelong chagrin welled up in him, flooding his soul with
bitterness.

If Lemuel Keith had not adored his brother, he would have hated
him--hated him for possessing that one quality of rash courage beside
which every other virtue seemed mean and worthless.

Presently he found himself looking in at the window again. Joe had
disappeared from the scene. Bub Quinn and his Aggy were sitting side by
side in stony silence. The fiddles had fallen into a more sentimental
strain; hints of "The Mocking Bird" might be heard struggling for
utterance in the strings. In this ambitious attempt the pitch would get
lower and lower, and then recover itself with a queer falsetto effect.
Charley Leroy, the crack "bronco-buster" of the region, was caller-out
this time. He was less inventive than the curly-headed boy, but he gave
out his commands in the same chanting measure, and the tramp, tramp of
the feet was as rhythmic as ever. The curly-headed boy was having his
turn at the dance, "assisted" by a sallow, middle-aged woman in a brown
woollen dress, who made frequent dashes into the adjoining room to quiet
her baby. Lem noticed that the hands of the curly-headed boy were so
tanned that the finger-nails showed white by contrast. He also observed
that Aggy's neck was as pink as her cheeks, which had not been the case
half an hour before. In his effort not to look at Bub Quinn, Lem's
attention had become vague and scattered. He fixed his eyes upon an
elderly man of an anxious countenance, with a shock of tow-colored hair
sticking straight out in all directions. The man was having some
difficulty in steering his partner through an intricate figure; he was
the only person on the floor who did not keep step, and his movements
became at every moment more vague and undecided. When, at last, the
wiry, determined-looking "bronco-buster" sprang upon the company the
somewhat abstruse direction:

"Lady round the gent, and the gent don't go;
Lady round the lady, and the gent so-_lo_!"

the "gent" in question became hopelessly bewildered, and stood stock
still in the middle of the floor. By the time the set was disentangled,
the dance seemed to be over, and the "bronco-buster" dismissed the
dancers with the cynical prophecy, "You'll all get married on a _stor-my
day_!"

At this juncture, midnight being well passed, supper was announced. The
kitchen door swung open, and the fragrant smell of the coffee took
possession of the roo