hat they would do.

"Well," said Mr. Holland, who had gone as far as the door, "I don't know
what young folks are coming to. After nine o'clock now!"

"That must be a punk school Deane goes to," said Ted, his mind not yet
pried from the football talk.

CHAPTER SIX

"Our dance."

With a swift little movement the girl turned a glowing face to the man
standing before her. Flushed with dancing, keyed high in the pleasure
and triumphs of the evening, she turned the same radiant face to Stuart
Williams as he claimed their dance that she would have turned to almost
anyone claiming a dance. It was something that came to life in the man's
eyes as he looked down into her flushed face, meeting her happy, shining
eyes, that arrested the flashing, impersonal smile of an instant before
and underneath that impersonal gladness of youth there was a faint
flutter of self.

He was of the "older crowd;" it happened that she had never danced with
him before. He was a better dancer than the boys of her own set, but
somehow that old impersonal joy in dancing was a lesser thing now than
the sense of dancing with this man.

"That was worth coming for," he said quietly, when the dance and the
encore to it were over and they found themselves by one of the doors
opening out on the balcony.

She looked up with a smile. It was a smile curiously touched with
shyness. He saw the color wavering in her sensitive, delicate face. Then
he asked lightly: "Shall we see what's being dispensed from this
punch-bowl?"

With their ice, they stood looking out into the moonlight over a wide
stretch of meadow to far hills. "A fine night to ride over the hills and
far away," he laughed at last, his voice lingering a little on the
fancy.

She only laughed a little in reply, looking off there toward over the
hills and far away. Watching her, he wondered why he had never thought
anything much about her before. He would have said that Ruth Holland was
one of the nice attractive girls of the town, and beyond that could have
said little about her. He watched the flow of her slender neck into her
firm delicate little chin, the lovely corners of her mouth where feeling
lurked. The fancy came to him that she had not settled into flesh the
way most people did, that she was not fixed by it. He puzzled for the
word he wanted for her, then got it--luminous was what she was; he felt
a considerable satisfaction in having found that word.

"Seems to me you and