classes—­the Horsmans mostly cordial, Hippa and Pippa demonstratively so; but the Stympsons held aloof with the stiffest of bows, not one of them but good-natured Captain George Stympson would shake hands even with me, and Miss Avice Stympson, of Lake House, made as if Harold were an object invisible to the naked eye, while the kind old earl was doing his best that he should not feel neglected.  Eustace had learnt dancing for that noted ball at Government House, but Harold had disavowed the possibility.  He had only danced once in his life, he said, when Dermot pressed him, “and that counted for nothing.”  To me the pain on the bent brow made it plain that it had been at the poor fellow’s wedding.

However, he stood watching, and when at the end of our quadrille Dermot said, “Here lies the hulk of the Great Harry,” there was an amused air about him, and at the further question, “Come, Alison, what do you think of our big corroborees?” he deliberately replied, “I never saw such a pretty sight!” And on some leading exclamation from one of us, “It beats the cockatoos on a cornfield; besides, one has got to kill them!”

“Mr. Alison looks at our little diversion in the benevolent spirit of the giant whose daughter brought home ploughman, oxen, and all in her apron for playthings,” said Viola, who with Eustace had found her way to us, but we were all divided again, Viola being carried off by some grandee, Eustace having to search for some noble damsel to whom he had been introduced, and I falling to the lot of young Mr. Horsman, a nice person in himself, but unable to surmount the overcrowing of the elder sisters, who called him Baby Jack, and publicly ordered him about.  Even at the end of our dance, at the sound of Hippa’s authoritative summons, he dropped me suddenly, and I found myself gravitating towards Harold like a sort of chaperon.  I was amazed by his observing, “I think I could do it now.  Would you try me, Lucy?”

After all, he was but five-and-twenty, and could hardly look on anything requiring agility or dexterity without attempting it, so I consented, with a renewal of the sensations I remembered when, as a child, I had danced with grown-up men, only with alarm at the responsibility of what Dermot called “the steerage of the Great Harry,” since collision with such momentum as ours might soon be would be serious; but I soon found my anxiety groundless; he was too well made and elastic to be clumsy, and had perfect power over his own weight and strength, so that he could dance as lightly and safely as Dermot with his Irish litheness.

“Do you think I might ask Miss Tracy?” he said, in return for my compliments.

“Of course; why not?”

When he did ask, her reply was, “Oh, will you indeed?  Thank you.”  Which naivete actually raised her mother’s colour with annoyance.  But if she had a rod laid up, Viola did not feel it then; she looked radiant, and though I don’t believe three words passed between the partners, that waltz was the glory of the evening to her.