a number of horses were tethered in a row along the fence within. They
whinnied a cheerful greeting to John as Dorothy slipped his halter and shut
him into the field adjoining. Now should she walk into temptation with her
eyes and ears open? The gate stood wide, with only one field of perfumed
meadow-grass between her and the lights and music of Slocum's barn. The
sound of revelry by night could hardly have taken a more innocent form than
this rustic dancing of neighbors after a "raisin' bee," but had it been the
rout of Comus and his crew, and Dorothy the Lady Una trembling near, her
heart could hardly have throbbed more quickly as she crossed the dewy
meadow. A young maple stood within ten rods of the barn, and here she
crouched in shadow.

The great doors stood wide open and lanterns were hung from the beams,
lighting the space between the mows where a dance was set, with youths and
maidens in two long rows. The fiddlers sat on barrel-heads near the door;
a lantern hanging just behind projected their shadows across the square
of light on the trodden space in front, where they executed a grotesque
pantomime, keeping time to the music with spectral wavings and noddings.
The dancers were Dorothy's young neighbors, whom she had known, and yet not
known, all her life, but they had the strangeness of familiar faces seen
suddenly in some fantastic dream.

Surely that was Nancy Slocum in the bright pink gown heading the line of
girls, and that was Luke Jordan's sunburnt profile leaning from his place
to pluck a straw from the mow behind him. They were marching, and the
measured tramp of feet keeping solid time to the fiddles set a strange
tumult vibrating in Dorothy's blood; and now it stopped, with a thrill, as
she recognized that Evesham was there, marching with the young men, and
that his peer was not among them. The perception of his difference came
to her with a vivid shock. He was coming forward now with his light, firm