The double quadrille of honor passed off with much elegance, everybody not participating in it being green with envy because he was not.  Mrs. Carey and the Admiral were partners; Nancy danced with Mr. Popham, Kathleen with Digby, Julia with Bill Harmon.  The other couples were Mrs. Popham and Gilbert, Lallie Joy and Cyril Lord, Olive and Nat Harmon, while Mrs. Bill led out a very shy and uncomfortable gentleman who had dug the ditches for Cousin Ann’s expensive pipes.

Then the fun and the frolic began in earnest.  The girls had been practising the old-fashioned contra dances all summer, and training the younger generation in them at the Vacation School.  The old folks needed no rehearsal!  If you had waked any of them in the night suddenly they could have called the changes for Speed the Plough, The Soldier’s Joy, The Maid in the Pump Room, or Hull’s Victory.

Money Musk brought Nancy and Mr. Henry Lord on to the floor as head couple; a result attained by that young lady by every means, fair or foul, known to woman; at least a rudimentary, budding woman of seventeen summers!  His coming to the party at all was regarded by Mother Carey, who had spent the whole force of her being in managing it, as nothing short of a miracle.  He had accepted partly from secret admiration of his handsome neighbor, partly to show the village that he did not choose always to be a hermit crab, partly out of curiosity to see the unusual gathering.  Having crawled out of his selfish shell far enough to grace the occasion, he took another step when Nancy asked him to dance.  It was pretty to see her curtsey when she put the question, pretty to see the air of triumph with which she led him to the head of the line, and positively delightful to the onlookers to see Hen Lord doing right and left, ladies’ chain, balance to opposite and cast off, at a girl’s beck and call.  He was not a bad dancer, when his sluggish blood once got into circulation; and he was considerably more limber at the end of Money Musk, considerably less like a wooden image, than at the beginning of it.

In the interval between this astounding exhibition and the Rochester Schottisch which followed it, Henry Lord went up to Mrs. Carey, who was sitting in a corner a little apart from her guests for the moment.

“Shall I go to South America, or shall I not?” he asked her in an undertone.  “Olive seems pleasantly settled, and Cyril tells me you will consent to take him into your family for six months; still, I would like a woman’s advice.”

Mother Carey neither responded, “I should prefer not to take the responsibility of advising you,” nor “Pray do as you think best”; she simply said, in a tone she might have used to a fractious boy: 

“I wouldn’t go, Mr. Lord!  Wait till Olive and Cyril are a little older.  Cyril will grow into my family instead of into his own; Olive will learn to do without you; worse yet, you will learn to do without your children.  Stay at home and have Olive come back to you and her brother every week end.  South America is a long distance when there are only three of you!”