company to the dance; and she caught a glimpse of the
farmhouse itself, where doubtless refreshments were even now in
readiness. Phil was far enough away to be safe from observation and yet
near enough to identify many of the dancers. They were chiefly young
people she had known all her life, and the strangers were presumably
friends of the Holtons from Indianapolis and elsewhere.

The strains of a familiar waltz caused a quick reassembling of the
dancers. The music tingled in Phil's blood. She kept time with head and
hands, and then, swinging round, began dancing, humming the air as her
figure swayed and bent to its cadences. By some whim the nearest
corn-shock became the center of her attention. Round and round it she
moved, with a child's abandon; and now that the moon's full glory lay
upon the fields, her shadow danced mockingly with her. Fauns and nymphs
tripped thus to wild music in the enchanted long ago when the world was
young. Hers was the lightest, the most fantastic of irresponsible
shadows. It was not the mere reflection of her body, but a prefigurement
of her buoyant spirit, that had escaped from her control and tauntingly
eluded capture. Her mind had never known a morbid moment; she had never
feared the dark, without or within. And this was her private affair--a
joke between her and the moon and the earth. It was for the moment all
hers--earth and heaven, the mystery of the stars, the slumbering power
of a beneficent land that only yesterday had vouchsafed its kindly
fruits in reward of man's labor.

After a breathless interval a two-step followed, and Phil danced again,
seizing a corn-stalk and holding it above her head with both hands like
a wand. When the music ended she poised on tiptoe and flung the stalk
far from her toward the barn as though it were a javelin. Then as she
took a step toward the fence she was aware that some one had been
watching her. It was, indeed, a nice question whether the flying stalk
had not grazed the ear of a man who stood on Holton soil, his arms
resting on the rail just as hers had been ten minutes earlier, and near
the same spot.

"'Lo!" gasped Phil breathlessly.

"'Lo!"

They surveyed each other calmly in the moonlight. The young man beyond
the fence straightened and removed his hat. He had been watching her
antics round the corn-shock and Phil resented it.

"What were you doing that for?" she demanded indignantly, her hands in
her sweater pockets.

"Doing wha