Night after night Martha Josselyn had sat there with the waltz-music in her ears, and her little feet, that had had one merry winter’s training before the war, and many a home practice since with the younger ones, quivering to the time beneath her robes, and seen other girls chosen out and led away,—­young matrons, and little short-petticoated children even, taken to “excursionize” between the figures,—­while nobody thought of her.  “I might be ninety, or a cripple,” she said to her sister, “from their taking for granted it is nothing to me.  How is it that everything goes by, and I only twenty?” There had been danger that Martha Josselyn’s sweet, generous temper should get a dash of sour, only because of there lying alongside it a clear common-sense and a pure instinct of justice.  Susan’s heart longed with a motherly tenderness for her young sister when she said such words,—­longed to put all pleasant things somehow within her reach.  She had given it up for herself, years since.  And now, all at once, Sin Saxon came and “took her out.”

It was a more generous act than it shows for, written.  There is a little tacit consent about such things which few young people of a “set” have thought, desire, or courage to disregard.  Sin Saxon never did anything more gracefully.  It was one of the moments that came now, when she wist not that she shone.  She was dropping, little by little, in the reality of a better desire, that “satisfaction” Jeannie Hadden had spoken of, of “knowing when one is at one’s prettiest,” or doing one’s cleverest.  The “leaf and the fruit” never fitted better in their significance than to Sin Saxon.  Something intenser and more truly living was taking the place of the mere flutter and flash and grace of effect.

It was the figure in which the dancers form in facing columns, two and two, the girls and the young men; when the “four hands round” keeps them moving in bright circles all along the floor, and under arches of raised and joined hands the girls came down, two and two, to the end, forming their long line face to face against the opposing line of their partners.  The German may be, in many respects, an undesirable dance; it may be, as I have sometimes thought, at least a selfish dance, affording pleasure chiefly to the initiated few, and excluding gradually, almost from society itself, those who do not participate in it.  I speak of it here neither to uphold nor to condemn,—­simply because they did dance it at Outledge as they do everywhere, and I cannot tell my story without it; but I think at this moment, when Sin Saxon led the figure with Martha Josselyn, there was something lovely, not alone in its graceful grouping, but in the very spirit and possibility of the thing that so appeared.  There is scope and chance even here, young girls, for the beauty of kindness and generous thought.  Even here, one may give a joy, may soothe a neglect, may make some heart conscious for a moment of the great warmth of a human welcome; and, though it be but to a pastime, I think it comes into the benison of the Master’s words when, even for this, some spirit gets a feeling like them,—­“I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”