his man-of-the-world
composure failing him. Judith was circling nearer now, slender and
desirable. He hesitated between an angry glare and a forgiving smile,
but she did not look to see which he chose. She whirled quickly by.

"Smooth little dancer, and she's no snob. Judy's all right," said Ed.
"Watch Murph! He's catching on--never danced till last night. Some of
the fellows taught him. He never danced with a girl before."

"If my feet hurt," remarked Mr. Nash irrelevantly, and without the close
attention from his friend which this important announcement called for,
"I may not dance at all to-night."

Willard stopped abruptly. "What do you know about that"; a voice was
saying, in the rear of the dressing-room; he stiffly refrained from
turning to see whose, "Judith is dancing the first dance with Neil
Donovan!"

Judith was dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan. It was social
history already, accepted as such, and not further discussed, even by
Willard. But many epoch-making events are not even so much discussed,
they look so simple on the face of them. We cross a room, and change the
course of our lives by crossing it, and few people even observe that we
have crossed the room.

If Judith had affected the course of her life materially by crossing the
room to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now.
She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following her
partner's erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so;
feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked and
sparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, but nothing more.

The wistful and dreamy look was gone from her eyes, and her half-formed
desire for something to happen this evening, something that had never
happened before, was gone from her, too. She felt content with whatever
was going to happen, and deeply interested in it, and particularly
interested in dancing.

They had danced almost in silence, rather a grim silence at first, but
now that the boy could let the music carry him with it, and was
beginning to trust it, too, the silence was comfortable. But the few
words he managed to say were worth listening to and answering, not to be
dreamed through and ignored, like Willard's. His voice was not as she
remembered it, and that was interesting, too, deeply significant, though
she could not have said why. Everything seemed unaccountably interesting
to-night.

"I thought it was louder," she sa