“The cotillion?” repeated Bassett, glancing at his watch.  “Hasn’t Dan got here yet?  He had a committee meeting to-night, but it ought to have been over before now.”

Sylvia noted that the serious look came into his eyes again for an instant.

“He oughtn’t to have had a committe meeting on the night of my party.  And it’s a holiday too.”

“And after all the rehearsing we’ve done at Aunt Sally’s the cherry-tree figure absolutely has to have him,” said Allen.  “Maybe I’d better send a scout to look him up or run over to the State House myself.”

“Oh, he’ll be here,” murmured Sylvia.

Dan had undoubtedly intended to appear early at the dance, and she wondered whether his delay might not be due to the crisis in his relations with Bassett of which the politician had hinted.  As she ran off with Allen to make sure the apparatus for the german was in order, she wished Bassett had not spoken to her of Harwood.

Sylvia and Allen had despaired of Dan when at a quarter of twelve he appeared.  He met their reproaches cheerfully, and airily explained his delay.

“State’s business!  Can you imagine me fresh from Richelieu’s cabinet, with a trail of dead horses on the road behind me?  In plain prose I didn’t get home to dress until eleven, and the snow makes it hard going.”

He had dressed with care nevertheless and had never looked better.  Sylvia sent Allen ahead to begin clearing the floor for the cotillion, and followed more slowly with Harwood.

“I suppose,” he remarked, half to himself, “that I really oughtn’t to do it.”

“What—­you hesitate now after keeping the stage waiting!”

“It may be a case for an understudy.  There are reasons why.”

“Then—­you have done it?”

They were at the turn of the stair and Sylvia paused.  He was conscious of a quick catch in her breath.  Her eyes met his for an instant searchingly.

“Yes; I have done it,” he answered, and looked at her wonderingly.

A moment later he had made his peace with Mrs. Owen and paid his compliments to Mrs. Bassett at the favor table, heaped high with beribboned hatchets and bunches of cherries for the first figure.

Morton Bassett had heard praise of his daughter from many lips, but he watched her joyous course through the cherry-tree figure in the german with an attention that was not wholly attributable to fatherly pride.  Harwood’s white-gloved hand led her hither and thither through the intricate maze; one must have been sadly lacking in the pictorial sense not to have experienced a thrill of delight in a scene so animate with grace, so touched with color.  It was ungracious to question the sincerity of those who pronounced Marian the belle of the ball when Colonel Ramsay, the supreme authority in Hoosier pulchritude, declared her to be the fairest rose in a rose-garden of girls.  He said the same thing to the adoring parents of a