sweep of the sky.

"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured. "When
everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be great?
Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions into a life like
that? If only I could find one thing in it all that mattered greatly,
one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will life never give me
that one great moment?"

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes outside.
It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but Margaret started
violently and trembled so that she caught the foot of the bed for
support. Again she felt herself pursued by some overwhelming longing,
some desperate necessity for herself, like the outstretching of
helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with
sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, "I love you more
than Christ who died for me!" ringing in her ears.

III

About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the old
men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of revelry and stamped
the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the violin from the
Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more
and more characteristic--rude, half mournful music, made up of the
folksongs of the North, that the villagers sing through the long night
in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of the sun, and the
spring, and the fishermen so long away. To Margaret some of it sounded
like Grieg's _Peer Gynt_ music. She found something irresistibly
infectious in the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and
she felt almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom
in them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight.
Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they caught at it
wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers.
They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing
winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of
their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited
maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower
of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the
glass and hot blood in the heart; tonight they danced.

Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He