At eight o’clock the ball opened. Madelon
stood up in the little gallery allotted to the violins
and lilted, and the march began. Two and two,
the young men and the girls swung around the room.
Madelon lilted with her eyes upon the moving throng,
gay as a garden in a wind; and suddenly her heart
stood still, although she lilted on. Down on
the floor below Burr Gordon led the march, with Dorothy
Fair on his arm. Dorothy Fair, waving a great
painted fan with the tremulous motion of a butterfly’s
wing, with her blue brocade petticoat tilting airily
as she moved, like an inverted bell-flower, with a
locket set in brilliants flashing on her white neck,
with her pink-and-white face smiling out with gentle
gayety from her fair curls, stepped delicately, pointing
out her blue satin toes, around the ball-room, with
one little white hand on Burr Gordon’s arm.
Chapter III
Suddenly all Madelon’s beauty was cheapened
in her own eyes. She saw herself swart and harsh-faced
as some old savage squaw beside this fair angel.
She turned on herself as well as on her recreant lover
with rage and disdain—and all the time she
lilted without one break.
The ball swung on and on, and Madelon, up in the musicians’
gallery, sang the old country-dances in the curious
dissyllabic fashion termed lilting. It never
occurred to her to wonder how it was that Dorothy
Fair, the daughter of the orthodox minister, should
be at the ball—she who had been brought
up to believe in the sinful and hellward tendencies
of the dance. Madelon only grasped the fact that
she was there with Burr; but others wondered, and the
surprise had been great when Dorothy in her blue brocade
had appeared in the ball-room.
This had been largely of late years a liberal and
Unitarian village, but Parson Fair had always held
stanchly to his stern orthodox tenets, and promulgated
them undiluted before his thinning congregations and
in his own household. Dorothy could not only not
play cards or dance, but she could not be present at
a party where the cards were produced or the fiddle
played. There was, indeed, a rumor that she had
learned to dance when she was in Boston at school,
but no one knew for certain.
Dorothy Fair was advancing daintily between the two
long lines, holding up her blue brocade to clear her
blue-satin shoes, to meet the young man from the opposite
corner, flinging out gayly towards her, when suddenly,
with no warning whatever, a great dark woman sped
after her through the dance, like a wild animal of
her native woods. She reached out her black hand
and caught Dorothy by the white, lace-draped arm,
and she whispered loud in her ear.
The people near, finding it hard to understand the
African woman’s thick tongue, could not exactly
vouch for the words, but the purport of her hurried
speech they did not mistake. Parson Fair had
discovered Mistress Dorothy’s absence, and home
she must hasten at once. It was evident enough
to everybody that staid and decorous Dorothy had run
away to the ball with Burr Gordon, and a smothered
titter ran down the files of the Virginia reel.
