sort of way, in and out,
among the others, and her dress was beautiful, too, like a flower. The
boy in the corner was watching it. He did not see Judith come.

"I thought you couldn't be real. When I never saw you again I thought I
had dreamed you."

Judith said it softly and breathlessly, and he did not hear. She put her
hand on his arm, and he turned and looked at her.

"Don't you remember me?" Judith was too happy to be hurt even by this.
The light, sweet music called to her. "Don't you remember? Never mind!
Come and dance with me."

CHAPTER FOUR

Willard stood still and stared after Judith for one bewildered minute;
that was as long as he could stand still. Odd Fellows' Hall had ceased
to afford standing-room.

The floor was filling and more than filling with determined young
persons who were there to dance, and looked as if they had never had any
aim but to dance. The enthralled silence, which was more general than
conversation, advertised it. Even acknowledged belles, like the girl in
red, coquetted incidentally, with significant but brief confidences and
briefer upward glances. There was an alarming concentration, intent as
youth itself, to be read in their unsmiling faces and eager eyes.

They danced quite wonderfully, most of them, as only country-bred young
people can, with free-limbed young bodies, more used to adventuring in
the open air than to dancing, but attuned to the rhythm of the dance by
right of their youth. The old-fashioned waltz, that our grandmothers
lost their hearts to the time of, still prevailed in Green River; not
the jerkier performance that was already opening the way for the
one-step and the dance craze in larger centres, but the old waltz, with
the first beat of each measure heavily emphasized--a slow swinging,
beautiful dance, and they danced it with all their hearts.

In and out among them, two slender, quick-turning figures were making an
intricate way. The girl danced delicately and surely, a faint, half
smile parting her lips, her small, smooth head erect, the silvery gold
hair that crowned it shimmering and pale in the uncompromising light of
the newly installed electric chandeliers, her eyes intent on the boy.

His performance was not expert, but it had a charm all its own. He put a
great deal of strength into it, and made it evident that he possessed
still more; strength enough to master the art of dancing once and for
all, by the sheer force of it, if he care