Osh Popham stayed behind to cover the piano, put out the lanterns, close the doors and windows, and lock the barn, while Mrs. Carey and the Admiral strolled slowly along the greensward to the side door of the house.

“Good-night,” Osh called happily as he passed them a few minutes later.  “I guess Beulah never see a party such as ourn was, this evenin’!  I guess if the truth was known, the State o’ Maine never did, neither!  Good-night, all!  Mebbe if I hurry along I can ketch up with Maria!”

His quick steps brushing the grassy pathway could be heard for some minutes in the clear still air, and presently the sound of his mellow tenor came floating back:—­

  “Come, my beloved, haste away,
  Cut short the hours of thy delay. 
  Fly like a youthful hart or roe
  Over the hills where spices grow.”

Julia had gone upstairs with the sleepy Peter-bird, who had been enjoying his first experience of late hours on the occasion of Nancy’s coming out; the rest of the young folks were gathered in a group under the elms, chatting in couples,—­Olive and Ralph Thurston, Kathleen and Cyril Lord, Nancy and Tom Hamilton.  Then they parted, Tom Hamilton strolling to the country hotel with the young school teacher for companion, while Olive and Cyril walked across the fields to the House of Lords.

It was a night in a thousand.  The air was warm, clear, and breathlessly still; so still that not a leaf stirred on the trees.  The sky was cloudless, and the moon, brilliant and luminous, shone as it seldom shines in a northern clime.  The water was low in Beulah’s shining river and it ran almost noiselessly under the bridge.  While Kathleen and Julia were still unbraiding their hair, exclaiming at every twist of the hand as to the “loveliness” of the party, Nancy had kissed her mother and crept silently into bed.  All night long the strains of The Tempest ran through her dreams.  There was the touch of a strange hand on hers, an altogether new touch, warm and compelling.  There was the gay trooping down the centre of the barn in fours,—­some one by her side who had never been there before,—­and a sensation entirely new and intoxicating, that whenever she met the glance of her partner’s merry dark eyes she found herself at the bottom of them.

Was she a child when she heard Osh Popham cry:  “Take your partners for The Tempest!” and was she a woman when he called:  “All promenade to seats!” She hardly knew.  Beulah was a dream; the Yellow House was a dream, the dance was a dream, the partner was a dream.  At one moment she was a child helping her father to plant the crimson rambler, at another she was a woman pulling a rose from the topmost branch and giving it to some one who steadied her hand on the trellis; some one who said “Thank you” and “Good-night” differently from the rest of the world.