to offerin’ yet to my way of thinkin’.  Now.  I want to ask you, Miss Sheila, if you’ve got red blood in your veins and a love of adventure and a wish to see that real entertaining show we call ’life’—­and mighty few females ever get a glimpse of it—­and if you’ve acquired a feeling of gratitude for Pap and if you’ve got any real religion, or any ambition to play a part, if you’re a real woman that wants to be an in-spire-ation to men, well, ma’am, I ask you, could you turn down a chance like that?”

He stood away a pace and put his question with a lifted forefinger.

Sheila’s eyes were caught and held by his.  Again her mind seemed to be fastened to his will.  And the blood ran quickly in her veins.  Her heart beat.  She was excited, stirred.  He had seen through her shell unerringly as no one else in all her life had seen.  He had mysteriously guessed that she had the dangerous gift of adventure, that under the shyness and uncertainty of inexperience there was no fear in her, that she was one of those that would rather play with fire than warm herself before it.  Sheila stood there, discovered and betrayed.  He had played upon her as upon a flexible young reed:  that stop, her ambition, this, her romanticism, that, her vanity, the fourth, her gratitude, the fifth, her idealism, the sixth, her recklessness.  And there was this added urge—­she must stay here and drudge under the lash of “Momma’s” tongue or she must accept this strange, this unimaginable offer.  Again she opened her eyes wider and wider.  The pupils swallowed up the misty gray.  Her lips parted.

“I’ll do it,” she said, narrowed her eyes and shut her mouth tight.  With such a look she might have thrown a fateful toss of dice.

Sylvester caught her hands, pressed them up to his chest.

“It’s a promise, girl?”

“Yes.”

“God bless you!”

He let her go.  He walked on air.  He threw open the door.

There on the threshold—­stood “Momma.”

“I kind of see,” she drawled, “why Sheila don’t take no interest in dancin’!”

“You’re wrong,” said Sheila very clearly.  “I have been persuaded.  I am going to the dance.”

Sylvester laughed aloud.  “One for you, Momma!” he said.  “Come on down, old girl, while Miss Sheila gets into her party dress.  Say, Aura, aren’t you goin’ to give me a dance to-night?”

His wife looked curiously at his red, excited face.  She followed him in silence down the stairs.

Sheila stood still listening to their descending steps, then she knelt down beside her little trunk and opened the lid.  The sound of the fiddle stole hauntingly, beseechingly, tauntingly into her consciousness.  There in the top tray of her trunk wrapped in tissue paper lay the only evening frock she had, a filmy French dress of white tulle, a Christmas present from her father, a breath-taking, intoxicating extravagance.  She had worn it only once.