ced; even my heart, which had started out as heavy
as lead, got into the feather class before I went around the room three
times. It is strange how even great responsibilities melt away before
dance music like icicles on the southern side of the house. It was in a
perfectly melted condition that I at last dropped from Tolly's grasp
into a pair of new arms which cradled me against a broad breast with
such gentleness that I might have thought it was mother come to the
dance if I hadn't caught a whiff of cedar woodsiness when I turned my
nose into a miniature brier-patch of blue-berried cedar in the
buttonhole of the coat against which my face was pressed as my feet
caught step with a pair of smart shoes bearing a smear of moss loam on
one side.

"Sam!" I gasped, with emotional indignation that had a decided trace of
joy.

"Yes, I feel that way, too," answered Sam, roughing my hair slightly
with his chin as both his hands were employed holding me to him while we
slid and skidded and slid again. "I don't forgive you; I never shall," I
said, haughtily, as I drew away from him the fraction of an inch that
came very near making us collide with Sue and Billy, who were dancing
wildly, but in perfect accord.

"You'll have to when you hear the worst," answered Sam, as he firmly
pressed my shoulder into his while he manoeuvered me first past Edith
and Tolly and then across right in front of Pink Herriford, who weighs
all of two hundred, dancing with Julia Buford, who must tip the scales
at one hundred and sixty. It was a hairbreadth rapture of escape.

"Is anything the matter with the cows or anybody else?" I demanded,
anxiously, from his shoulder.

"Worse!"

"Oh, Sam, has anything died at The Briers?"

"Worse," he answered again, while he defied Tolly with a double cross
and then took a chance with Pink and Julia as I pressed him closer with
my arms and my questions.

"Dance me out on the porch through the window and tell me, Sam," I
demanded.

"Not when this music and Julia and Pink hold out like that, Bettykin.
It'll be bad enough when you do hear it," answered Sam, laughing down at
me with the same wide-mouthed smile he had always used on me when
holding something over my head and making me reach up for it. "Besides,
it has been two whole weeks since I've--had you," he added, and again
his strong arms cradled as well as guided. Getting back into some
people's atmosphere is like recovering the use of a lung a person