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.

She nodded her head wisely. "I know."

"You know a lot." In his soft brogue this sounded like the most complimentary thing that could be said.

"But you don't remember me." This had troubled her at first. Now it seemed like the most delicious of jokes, and they laughed at it together.

"That was the first thing you said to me."

"Isn't it queer"—Judith's eyes widened and darkened as if it were something more than queer, something far worse—"so queer! I can't think what the first thing was that you said to me."

They confronted this problem in silence, staring at each other with wide-open eyes. Though they were circling smoothly at last, carried on by the slow, sweet music, so that they hardly seemed to be moving at all, and though he did not really move his head, the boy's eyes seemed to Judith to be coming nearer to hers, nearer all the time. They were beautiful eyes, deep brown, and very clear. His brown hair grew in a squarish line across his forehead, and waved softly at the temples. It looked as if he had brushed it hard there to brush the curl out, but it was curliest there.

"You've got the brownest eyes," said Judith.

"You've got the biggest eyes. Won't you tell me your name?"

Judith did not answer. She looked away from the disconcerting brown eyes and down at her hand, against his shoulder, her own little hand, with the careful manicure and the dull polish that was all her mother permitted; bare of rings, though Norah had given her a beautiful garnet ring for Christmas. How shiny his coat-sleeve was, and her hand looked unfamiliar to her—not like her own at all. She pressed tighter against his shoulder to steady herself.

The music was growing quicker and louder, working up gradually but surely into a breathless crescendo that meant the end of the dance. It whirled them dizzily about. The sleepy spell of the dance broke in this final crash of noise, and as it broke a sudden panic caught Judith.

What had she been saying to this boy? She had never talked like this to a boy before. And why was she dancing with him? She ought to be dancing with Willard—Willard, waiting there in the dressing-room door with her dance order in his hand, with the patient and puzzled look in his eyes, with brick-red colour in his cheeks from the affront she had subjected him to. What would Willard think of her? What would her mother think? And who was this boy? Just what the children had called him in taunting screams, on that long-ago May night, and she would have liked to scream it now—a paddy.

Instead, she lifted her head, no longer afraid of the boy's brown eyes, and said it, as cruelly as she could, in her soft and clear little voice:

"Paddy," she said; "a paddy from Paddy Lane."

She looked defiantly into his eyes, but they did not grow angry. They only grew very soft and kind, and they laughed at her. She wanted to look away from the laughter in them, but she could not look away from the kindness. Now she was not angry with him any more, but glad she was dancing with him. She knew she never wanted to stop dancing.

"Paddy?" He thought she had said it to remind him of that May night; he was remembering it now. "Are you that little girl?"

"Yes."

"The little girl who broke the lantern?"

"Yes," said Judith proudly.

"And had such long black legs, and went scuttling across the lawn, and screaming out to me—that funny little girl?"

"But I did break the lantern," said Judith.

All the bravest stories that she had made up in the dark to put herself to sleep with at night, all the perilous adventures of land and sea, camp fire or pirate ship, began with the breaking of that lantern, and the boy she rescued had been her companion upon them, her brushwood boy, her own boy. She had found him at last, and he was laughing—laughing at her.

"Sure you did. As if I couldn't have broken away from a bunch of fool kids, without being doped with the smell of kerosene, and yelled at by another fool kid. Sure you broke the lantern. How mad I was."

"You didn't remember." It was not a joke any longer now, but a tragedy, and Judith felt overwhelmed by it, alone in the world. "You forgot, and I—remembered."

The brown eyes and the gray met in one last long look and when the brown eyes saw the hurt in Judith's, the laughter died out of them. Again they seemed to be growing nearer and nearer to hers, but this time Judith was not afraid, she was glad.

"If you didn't save my life then, you did to-night." It came in a husky burst of confidence, straight from his shy boy's heart, very rare and very precious. Judith caught her breath.

"Oh, did I? Did I?"

"Yes. This crowd here had me mad—crazy mad. I was going home. I was going to get off the team. I wasn't going to school next week, and I've worked my hands off to get there. Maybe you remembered and I forgot, but—I won't forget again. You were that little girl." It was not a slight to the little girl she used to be, but a tribute to the girl she was; that was what looked out of his brown eyes at Judith, and sang through the brogue in his voice.

"You were that little girl—you!"

"Yes," breathed Judith; "yes!"

They whirled faster and faster. This was really the end of the dance, and this dance could never come again. Judith held tight to his shiny shoulder, breathless, hurrying to part with her secret and strip herself bare of mystery generously in a breath. All sorts of barriers might come between them, she might put them there herself, and she was quite aware of it, but not yet, not until the music stopped.

"My name's Judith—Judith Randall. Call me Judy."