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Rachel stood puzzled.

“Thee’s old enough to judge for thyself, Dorothy. But, my child, do not tamper with thy inclinations through heedless curiosity. Thee knows thee’s more impulsive than I could wish–for thy own peace.”

“I’ll be very careful, mother. If I feel in the least wicked I will not look.”

She kissed her mother’s hand, which rested on the window-sill. Rachel did not like the kiss, or Dorothy’s brilliant eyes and flushed cheeks, as the candle revealed them like a fair picture painted on the darkness. She hesitated, and Dorothy sped away up the lane with old John lagging at his halter.

Was it the music growing nearer that quickened her breathing, or only the closeness of the night, shut in between the wild grape-vine curtains, swung from one dark cedar column to another? She caught the sweet-brier breath as she hurried by, and now, a loop in the leafy curtain revealed the pond lying black in a hollow of the hills, with a whole heaven of stars reflected in it. Old John stumbled along over the stones, cropping the grass as he went. Dorothy tugged at his halter and urged him on to the head of the lane where two farm-gates stood at right angles. One of them was open, and a number of horses were tethered in a row along the fence within. They whinneyed a cheerful greeting to John as Dorothy slipped his halter and shut him into the field adjoining. Now should she walk into temptation with her eyes and ears open? The gate stood wide, with only one field of perfumed meadow-grass between her and the lights and music of Slocum’s barn! The sound of revelry by night could hardly have taken a more innocent form than this rustic dancing of neighbors after a “raisin’ bee,” but had it been the rout of Comus and his crew, and Dorothy the Lady Una, trembling near, her heart could hardly have throbbed more thickly as she crossed the dewy meadow. A young maple stood within ten rods of the barn, and here she crouched in shadow.

The great doors stood wide open, and lanterns were hung from the beams lighting the space between the mows, where a dance was set, with youths and maidens in two long rows. The fiddlers sat on barrel-heads near the door; a lantern hanging just behind projected their shadows across the square of light on the trodden space in front where they executed a grotesque pantomime, keeping time to the music with spectral wavings and noddings. The dancers were Dorothy’s young neighbors, whom she had known and yet not known all her life, but they had the strangeness of familiar faces seen suddenly in some fantastic dream.

Surely that was Nancy Slocum, in the bright pink gown, heading the line of girls, and that was Luke Jordan’s sunburnt profile leaning from his place to pluck a straw from the mow behind him. They were marching now, and the measured tramp of feet, keeping solid time to the fiddles, set a strange tumult vibrating in Dorothy’s blood; and now it stopped with a thrill as she recognized that Evesham was there marching with the young men, and that his peer was not among them. The perception of his difference came to her with a vivid shock. He was coming forward now, with his light, firm step, formidable in evening dress, and with a smile of subtle triumph in his eyes, to meet Nancy Slocum, in the bright pink gown; Dorothy felt she hated pink, of all the colors her faith had abjured. She could see, in spite of the obnoxious gown, that Nancy was very pretty. He was taking her first by the right hand, then by the left, and turning her gayly about;–and now they were meeting again, for the fourth or fifth time, in the centre of the barn, with all eyes upon them, and the music lingered while Nancy, holding out her pink petticoats, coyly revolved around him. Then began a mysterious turning, and clasping of hands, and weaving of Nancy’s pink frock and Evesham’s dark blue coat and white breeches in and out of the line of figures, until they met at the door, and taking each other by both hands, swept with a joyous measure to the head of the barn. Dorothy gave a little choking sigh.