Willard stood still and stared after Judith for one bewildered minute;
that was as long as he could stand still. Odd Fellows' Hall had ceased
to afford standing-room.
The floor was filling and more than filling with determined young
persons who were there to dance, and looked as if they had never had any
aim but to dance. The enthralled silence, which was more general than
conversation, advertised it. Even acknowledged belles, like the girl in
red, coquetted incidentally, with significant but brief confidences and
briefer upward glances. There was an alarming concentration, intent as
youth itself, to be read in their unsmiling faces and eager eyes.
They danced quite wonderfully, most of them, as only country-bred young
people can, with free-limbed young bodies, more used to adventuring in
the open air than to dancing, but attuned to the rhythm of the dance by
right of their youth. The old-fashioned waltz, that our grandmothers
lost their hearts to the time of, still prevailed in Green River; not
the jerkier performance that was already opening the way for the
one-step and the dance craze in larger centres, but the old waltz, with
the first beat of each measure heavily emphasized--a slow swinging,
beautiful dance, and they danced it with all their hearts.
In and out among them, two slender, quick-turning figures were making an
intricate way. The girl danced delicately and surely, a faint, half
smile parting her lips, her small, smooth head erect, the silvery gold
hair that crowned it shimmering and pale in the uncompromising light of
the newly installed electric chandeliers, her eyes intent on the boy.
His performance was not expert, but it had a charm all its own. He put a
great deal of strength into it, and made it evident that he possessed
still more; strength enough to master the art of dancing once and for
all, by the sheer force of it, if he cared to exert it, and a laughing
light in his eyes, as if dancing was not important enough for that, and
nothing else was.
An ambitious pair, experimenting with the dip waltz, just introduced
that year, and pausing on the most awkward spots in the crowded floor,
blocked his path, and he swung heavily out of their way just in time,
squaring his chin and holding his head a shade higher. The girl in red
was whirled toward him in double-quick time, and he dodged,
miscalculated his distance, but met the shock of her squarely, whisking
Judith out of her way.
"Good try, Murph," her partner called.
Willard regarded the encounter disapprovingly from the door of the
gentlemen's dressing-room, to which he had edged his way. His was not an
expressive countenance, and that was a protection to him just now. He
was bewildered and deeply hurt, but he merely looked fat and slightly
puzzled, as usual.
"Judy turn you down?" inquired his friend Mr. Ward, also watching from
the dressing-room door, with the few other gentlemen who were without
partners for this dance. It was the most important dance of the evening,
for you danced it with the lady of your choice, or with nobody. It
cemented new intimacies or foreshadowed the breaking of old; settled
anew the continually agitated question of "who was going with who."
"Judy turn you down?" said Mr. Ward, but he meant it as a pleasantry.
Mr. Willard Nash was not often turned down, even at this early age. He
was too eligible.
"Rena turn you down, Ed?"
"Yes." Mr. Ward became suddenly confidential, and lowered his voice.
"Mad. She wanted me to get her a shinguard to mount tintypes
on--tintypes of the team."
"Buy it or steal it?" inquired Willard sarcastically.
"I offered to buy it," his friend confessed, "buy her a new pair, but
she wants one that's been used."
"You spoil Rena. You can't spoil a girl." They laughed wisely. "It don't
pay."
"Mad with Judy?"
"Well--no," said Willard magnanimously. He thought quite rapidly, as his
brain, not overworked at other times, could do in emergencies. "My feet
hurt. Pumps slip at the heel. I've been stuffing them out. Judy came
with me, but I had to be excused for this dance."
"Good thing for him."
"Who?"
"For Murph--for Neil Donovan. They'll all dance with him if she does;
though Judy don't know that. She's not stuck on herself, and never will
be. I didn't know she knew Murph."
"Well, you know it now," said Willard shortly, his man-of-the-world
composure failing him. Judith was circling nearer now, slender and
desirable. He hesitated between an angry glare and a forgiving smile,
but she did not look to see which he chose. She whirled quickly by.
"Smooth little dancer, and she's no snob. Judy's all right," said Ed.
"Watch Murph! He's catching on--never danced till last night. Some of
the fellows taught him. He never danced with a girl before."
"If my feet hurt," remarked Mr. Nash irrelevantly, and without the close
attention from his friend which this important announcement called for,
"I may not dance at all to-night."
Willard stopped abruptly. "What do you know about that"; a voice was
saying, in the rear of the dressing-room; he stiffly refrained from
turning to see whose, "Judith is dancing the first dance with Neil
Donovan!"
Judith was dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan. It was social
history already, accepted as such, and not further discussed, even by
Willard. But many epoch-making events are not even so much discussed,
they look so simple on the face of them. We cross a room, and change the
course of our lives by crossing it, and few people even observe that we
have crossed the room.
If Judith had affected the course of her life materially by crossing the
room to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now.
She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following her
partner's erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so;
feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked and
sparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, but nothing more.
The wistful and dreamy look was gone from her eyes, and her half-formed
desire for something to happen this evening, something that had never
happened before, was gone from her, too. She felt content with whatever
was going to happen, and deeply interested in it, and particularly
interested in dancing.
They had danced almost in silence, rather a grim silence at first, but
now that the boy could let the music carry him with it, and was
beginning to trust it, too, the silence was comfortable. But the few
words he managed to say were worth listening to and answering, not to be
dreamed through and ignored, like Willard's. His voice was not as she
remembered it, and that was interesting, too, deeply significant, though
she could not have said why. Everything seemed unaccountably interesting
to-night.
"I thought it was louder," she said, "or higher--or something."
"What?"
"Your voice."
It was quite husky and low, and he pronounced a word here and there with
a brogue like Norah's, only pleasanter, with a kind of singing sound.
It was never the word you expected. You had to watch for it. She could
hear it now.
"Won't you please tell me who you are?"
"I know who you are, and I know where you live."
"Where do I?"
"At the Falls, and I know when you moved there--five years ago, or six."
"Six. How do you know?"
"Oh, I know."
As you grew older, and learned to call more boys and girls in the school
by name, and more of the clerks in the shops, you discovered new people
in the town where you thought you knew everybody, and it made the town
infinitely large. But this boy had not been so near her, or she would
have seen him. He could not have been in school with her. He must have
worked on a farm and studied by himself with the grammar-school teacher
at the Falls, and taken special examinations to enter the Junior class
this year, as Willard said that some boy at the Falls was doing. He must
be that boy or Judith would surely have seen him.