Little Mavis hung back, but the boy bounded into the middle of the
floor and started into a furious jig, his legs as loose from the
hip as a jumping-jack and the soles and heels of his rough brogans
thumping out every note of the music with astonishing precision
and rapidity. He hardly noticed Mavis at first, and then he began
to dance toward her, his eyes flashing and fixed on hers and his
black locks tumbling about his forehead as though in an electric
storm. The master was calling and the maid answered--shyly at
first, coquettishly by and by, and then, forgetting self and
onlookers, with a fiery abandon that transformed her. Alternately
he advanced and she retreated, and when, with a scornful toss of
that night-black head, the boy jigged away, she would relent and
lure him back, only to send him on his way again. Sometimes they
were back to back and the colonel saw that always then the girl
was first to turn, but if the lad turned first, the girl whirled
as though she were answering the dominant spirit of his eyes even
through the back of her head, and, looking over to the bed, he saw
his own little kinswoman answering that same masterful spirit in a
way that seemed hardly less hypnotic. Even Gray's clear eyes,
fixed at first on the little mountain girl, had turned to Jason,
but they were undaunted and smiling, and when Jason, seeing
Steve's face at the window and his mother edging out through the
front door, seemed to hesitate in his dance, and Mavis, thinking
he was about to stop, turned panting away from him, Gray sprang
from the bed like a challenging young buck and lit facing the
mountain boy and in the midst of a double-shuffle that the amazed
colonel had never seen outdone by any darkey on his farm.

"Jenny with a ruff-duff a-kickin' up the dust," clicked his feet.