“Of course she did,” returned Brooks coolly.  “I’ve just got her note.”

“What?” ejaculated the three men together.  “Mrs. Wade comin’?”

“Certainly!  Why shouldn’t she?  And it would do you good to come too, and shake the limp dampness out o’ you,” returned Brooks, as he quietly remounted his horse and cantered away.

“Darned ef I don’t think he’s got his eye on the widder,” said Johnson faintly.

“Or the quarter section,” added Briggs gloomily.

For all that, the eventful evening came, with many lights in the staring, undraped windows of the hotel, coldly bright bunting on the still damp walls of the long dining-room, and a gentle downpour from the hidden skies above.  A close carryall was especially selected to bring Mrs. Wade and her housekeeper.  The widow arrived, looking a little slimmer than usual in her closely buttoned black dress, white collar and cuffs, very glistening in eye and in hair,—­whose glossy black ringlets were perhaps more elaborately arranged than was her custom,—­and with a faint coming and going of color, due perhaps to her agitation at this tentative reentering into worldly life, which was nevertheless quite virginal in effect.  A vague solemnity pervaded the introductory proceedings, and a singular want of sociability was visible in the “sociable” part of the entertainment.  People talked in whispers or with that grave precision which indicates good manners in rural communities; conversed painfully with other people whom they did not want to talk to rather than appear to be alone, or rushed aimlessly together like water drops, and then floated in broken, adherent masses over the floor.  The widow became a helpless, religious centre of deacons and Sunday-school teachers, which Brooks, untiring, yet fruitless, in his attempt to produce gayety, tried in vain to break.  To this gloom the untried dangers of the impending dance, duly prefigured by a lonely cottage piano and two violins in a desert of expanse, added a nervous chill.  When at last the music struck up—­somewhat hesitatingly and protestingly, from the circumstance that the player was the church organist, and fumbled mechanically for his stops, the attempt to make up a cotillon set was left to the heroic Brooks.  Yet he barely escaped disaster when, in posing the couples, he incautiously begged them to look a little less as if they were waiting for the coffin to be borne down the aisle between them, and was rewarded by a burst of tears from Mrs. Johnson, who had lost a child two years before, and who had to be led away, while her place in the set was taken by another.  Yet the cotillon passed off; a Spanish dance succeeded; “Moneymusk,” with the Virginia Reel, put a slight intoxicating vibration into the air, and healthy youth at last asserted itself in a score of freckled but buxom girls in white muslin, with romping figures and laughter, at the lower end of the room.  Still a rigid decorum reigned among the elder dancers, and the figures were called out in grave formality, as if, to Brooks’s fancy, they were hymns given from the pulpit, until at the close of the set, in half-real, half-mock despair, he turned desperately to Mrs. Wade, his partner:—­