“Is your sister engaged yet?” Hannah asked, for want of something to say.

“You would know it if she was,” said Daniel, looking so troubled that Hannah reproached herself for the meaningless remark.

“How well she dances!” she made haste to say.

“Not better than you,” said Daniel, gallantly.

“I see compliments are among the fancy goods you deal in.  Do you reverse?” she added, as they came to an awkward corner.

“Yes—­but not my compliments,” he said smiling.  “Miriam taught me.”

“She makes me think of Miriam dancing by the Red Sea,” she said, laughing at the incongruous idea.

“She played a timbrel, though, didn’t she?” he asked.  “I confess I don’t quite know what a timbrel is.”

“A sort of tambourine, I suppose,” said Hannah merrily, “and she sang because the children of Israel were saved.”

They both laughed heartily, but when the waltz was over they returned to their individual gloom.  Towards supper-time, in the middle of a square dance, Sam suddenly noticing Hannah’s solitude, brought her a tall bronzed gentlemanly young man in a frock coat, mumbled an introduction and rushed back to the arms of the exacting Leah.

“Excuse me, I am not dancing to-night,” Hannah said coldly in reply to the stranger’s demand for her programme.

“Well, I’m not half sorry,” he said, with a frank smile.  “I had to ask you, you know.  But I should feel quite out of place bumping such a lot of swells.”

There was something unusual about the words and the manner which impressed Hannah agreeably, in spite of herself.  Her face relaxed a little as she said: 

“Why, haven’t you been to one of these affairs before?”

“Oh yes, six or seven years ago, but the place seems quite altered.  They’ve rebuilt it, haven’t they?  Very few of us sported dress-coats here in the days before I went to the Cape.  I only came back the other day and somebody gave me a ticket and so I’ve looked in for auld lang syne.”

An unsympathetic hearer would have detected a note of condescension in the last sentence.  Hannah detected it, for the announcement that the young man had returned from the Cape froze all her nascent sympathy.  She was turned to ice again.  Hannah knew him well—­the young man from the Cape.  He was a higher and more disagreeable development of the young man in the dress-coat.  He had put South African money in his purse—­whether honestly or not, no one inquired—­the fact remained he had put it in his purse.  Sometimes the law confiscated it, pretending he had purchased diamonds illegally, or what not, but then the young man did not return from the Cape.  But, to do him justice, the secret of his success was less dishonesty than the opportunities for initiative energy in unexploited districts.  Besides, not having to keep up appearances, he descended to menial occupations and toiled so long and terribly that he would probably have made just