Mrs. Motherwell had warned Tom against Maud Murray as well as Nellie Slater.  She had once seen Maud churning, and she had had a newspaper pinned to the wall in front of her, and was reading it as she worked, and Mrs. Motherwell knew that a girl who would do that would come to no good.

Martha Perkins was the one girl of whom Mrs. Motherwell approved.  Martha’s record on butter and quilts and mats stood high.  Martha was a nice quiet girl.  Mrs. Motherwell often said a “nice, quiet, unappearing girl.”  Martha certainly was quiet.  Her conversational attainments did not run high.  “Things is what they are, and what’s the good of saying anything,” Martha had once said in defence of her silent ways.

She was small and sallow-skinned and was dressed in an anaemic gray; her thin hay-coloured hair was combed straight back from a rather fine forehead.  She stooped a little when she walked, and even when not employed her hands picked nervously at each other.  Martha’s shyness, the “unappearing” quality, was another of her virtues in the eyes of Tom’s mother.  Martha rarely left home even to go to Millford.  Martha did not go to the Agricultural Fair when her mats and quilts and butter and darning and buttonholes on cotton got their red tickets.  Martha stayed at home and dug potatoes—­a nice, quiet, unappearing girl.

When they played games at the Slaters that evening, Martha would not play.  She never cared for games she said, they tired a person so.  She would just watch the others, and she wished again that she had her knitting.

Then the kitchen floor was cleared; table, chairs and lounge were set outside to make room for the dancing, and when the violins rang out with the “Arkansaw Traveller,” and big John Kennedy in his official voice of caller-off announced, “Select your partners,” every person felt that the real business of the evening had begun.

Tom had learned to dance, though his parents would have been surprised had they known it.  Out in the granary on rainy days hired men had obligingly instructed him in the mysteries of the two-step and waltz.  He sat in a corner and watched the first dance.  When Jim Russell came into the hall, after receiving a warm welcome from Mr. and Mrs. Slater, who stood at the door, he was conscious of a sudden thrill of pleasure.  It was the vision of Camilla, at the farther end of the dining-room, as she helped the Slater girls to receive their guests.  Camilla wore a red dress that brought out the blue-black of her eyes, and it seemed to Jim as he watched her graceful movements that he had never seen anyone so beautiful.  She was piloting a bevy of bashful girls to the stairway, and as she passed him she gave him a little nod and smile that set his heart dancing.

He heard the caller-off calling for partners for a quadrille.  The fiddlers had already tuned their instruments.  From where he stood he could see the figures forming, but Jim watched the stairway.  At last she came, with a company of other girls, none of whom he saw, and he asked her for the first dance.  Jim was not a conceited young man, but he felt that she would not refuse him.  Nor did she.