Everybody wanted to dance with me at the same time, and the girls kissed me into a lovely, warm cheerfulness.  The girls in Hayesboro are the sustaining kind of friends, like pound-cake, sweetened and beautifully frosted.  “Has he consented to let the hero kiss the poor thing’s hand before he goes to fight the case of the miners?” Julia whispered, warmly, as she took a few tango steps with me in her arms before Billy Robertson claimed her and Tolly picked me up to juggle with me in his new Kentucky version of the fox-trot.

“I’m expecting a letter to-morrow,” I answered her as Tolly slid me away three steps, skidded two, and slid back four.  And then, having begun, I danced; all of me danced; even my heart, which had started out as heavy as lead, got into the feather class before I went around the room three times.  It is strange how even great responsibilities melt away before dance music like icicles on the southern side of the house.  It was in a perfectly melted condition that I at last dropped from Tolly’s grasp into a pair of new arms which cradled me against a broad breast with such gentleness that I might have thought it was mother come to the dance if I hadn’t caught a whiff of cedar woodsiness when I turned my nose into a miniature brier-patch of blue-berried cedar in the buttonhole of the coat against which my face was pressed as my feet caught step with a pair of smart shoes bearing a smear of moss loam on one side.

“Sam!” I gasped, with emotional indignation that had a decided trace of joy.

“Yes, I feel that way, too,” answered Sam, roughing my hair slightly with his chin as both his hands were employed holding me to him while we slid and skidded and slid again.  “I don’t forgive you; I never shall,” I said, haughtily, as I drew away from him the fraction of an inch that came very near making us collide with Sue and Billy, who were dancing wildly, but in perfect accord.

“You’ll have to when you hear the worst,” answered Sam, as he firmly pressed my shoulder into his while he manoeuvered me first past Edith and Tolly and then across right in front of Pink Herriford, who weighs all of two hundred, dancing with Julia Buford, who must tip the scales at one hundred and sixty.  It was a hairbreadth rapture of escape.

“Is anything the matter with the cows or anybody else?” I demanded, anxiously, from his shoulder.

“Worse!”

“Oh, Sam, has anything died at The Briers?”

“Worse,” he answered again, while he defied Tolly with a double cross and then took a chance with Pink and Julia as I pressed him closer with my arms and my questions.

“Dance me out on the porch through the window and tell me, Sam,” I demanded.