She was silent at supper, while Amos and Lizzie went over the details of the morning again.  After the dishes were washed she sat on the steps in the dusk with Adam’s head in her lap when a carriage rolled up to the gate.  A man came swiftly up the path.  As he entered the stream of lamplight from the door Lydia with a gasp recognized Billy Norton.  Billy, wearing a dress suit and carrying a bouquet of flowers!

“Good evening, Lydia,” he said calmly.  “Will you go to the Senior Ball with me?”

Lydia was too much overcome for speech.  She never before had seen a man in a dress suit!  It made of Billy a man of the world.  Where was the country boy she had snubbed?

“Here are some flowers I hope you’ll wear,” Billy went on, formally.  “Would you mind hurrying?  It’s pretty late.”

“Oh, Billy!” breathed Lydia, at last.  “Aren’t you an angel!”

She jumped to her feet and rushed through the house into her room, leaving Billy to explain to her father and Lizzie.  In half an hour the two were seated in the carriage, an actual, party-going, city hack, and bumping gaily on the way to the Ball.

In her gratitude and delight, Lydia would have apologized to Billy for her last summer’s rudeness, but Billy gave her no opportunity.  He mentioned casually that he had been up on the reservation, for a week, returning only that afternoon so that he had missed her graduation exercises.  They chatted quite formally until they reached Odd Fellows’ Hall, where the dancing had already begun.

Lydia’s first dancing party!  Lydia’s first man escort and he wearing a dress suit and there were only two others in the Hall!  Who would attempt to describe the joy of that evening?  Who would have recognized Billy, the farmer, in the cool blond person who calmly appropriated Lydia’s card, taking half the dances for himself and parceling out the rest grudgingly and discriminatingly.  Kent was allowed two dances.  He was the least bit apologetic but Lydia in a daze of bliss was nonchalant and more or less uninterested in Kent’s surprise at seeing her at a dance.

For three hours, Lydia spun through a golden haze of melody and rhythm.  Into three hours she crammed all the joy, all the thrill, that she had dreamed of through her lonely girlhood.  At half after eleven she was waltzing with Billy.

“We must leave now, Lydia,” he said.  “I promised your father I’d have you home by midnight.”

“Oh, Billy!  Just one more two step and one more waltz,” pleaded Lydia.

“Nope,” he said, smiling down into her wistful eyes.  “I want to get a stand-in with your Dad because I want to take you to more parties.”

“Oh, Billy!  Do you!” breathed Lydia.  “Well, I don’t think there’s any one in the world has nicer things happen to them than I do!  Oh, Billy, just this waltz!”

It would have taken a harder heart than Billy’s to resist this.  He slipped his arm about her and they swung out on the floor to the strains of The Blue Danube, than which no lovelier waltz has ever been written.