the strings like trip-hammers, and his melancholy calls ringing high above the din of shuffling feet.  His grandfather was standing before the fireplace, his grizzled hair tousled and his face red with something more than the spirits of the dance.  The colonel was doing the “grand right and left,” and his mother was the colonel’s partner—­the colonel as gallant as though he were leading mazes with a queen and his mother simpering and blushing like a girl.  In one corner sat Steve Hawn, scowling like a storm-cloud, and on one bed sat Marjorie and the boy Gray watching the couple and apparently shrieking with laughter; and Jason wondered what they could be laughing about.  Little Mavis was not in sight.  When the dance closed he could see the colonel go over to the little strangers and, seizing each by the hand, try to pull them from the bed into the middle of the floor.  Finally they came, and the boy, looking through the window, and Mavis, who suddenly appeared in the door leading to the porch, saw a strange sight.  Gray took Marjorie’s right hand with his left and put his right arm around her waist and then to the stirring strains of “Soapsuds Over the Fence” they whirled about the room as lightly as two feathers in an eddy of air.  It was a two-step and the first round dance ever seen in these hills, and the mountaineers took it silently, grimly, and with little sign of favor or disapproval, except from old Jason, who, looking around for Mavis, caught sight of little Jason’s wondering face over her shoulder, for the boy had left the blurred window-pane and hurried around to the back door for a better view.  With a whoop the old man reached for the little girl, and gathered in the boy with his other hand.

“Hyeh!” he cried, “you two just git out thar an’ shake a foot!”

Little Mavis hung back, but the boy bounded into the middle of the floor and started into a furious jig, his legs as loose from the hip as a jumping-jack and the soles and heels of his rough brogans thumping out every note of the music with astonishing precision and rapidity.  He hardly noticed Mavis at first, and then he began to dance toward her, his eyes flashing and fixed on hers and his black locks tumbling about his forehead as though in an electric storm.  The master was calling and the maid answered—­shyly at first, coquettishly by and by, and then, forgetting self and onlookers, with a fiery abandon that transformed her.  Alternately he advanced and she retreated, and when, with a scornful toss of that night-black head, the boy jigged away, she would relent and lure him back, only to send him on his way again.  Sometimes they were back to back and the colonel saw that always then the girl was first to turn, but if the lad turned first, the girl whirled as though she were answering the dominant spirit of his eyes even through the back of her head, and, looking over to the bed, he saw his own little kinswoman answering that same masterful spirit in a way that seemed hardly less hypnotic.