The dress suited Rae. But for that matter any dress did. Rae’s clothes always seemed to belong to her. You could never imagine anyone else wearing them. Once she slipped a dress over that rippling gold-brown head you thought she must have been born in it. Pat reflected with a thrill of pride that she had never seen this darling sister looking so lovely. Her eyes had such starry lights in them behind her long lashes…eyes that were as full of charm as wood violets. To be sure, Rae wouldn’t have wanted her eyes compared to wood violets…or forget-me-nots either. That was Victorian. Cornflower blue, now…that sounded so much more up to date. Don Robinson had told her at the last club dance that her eyes were cornflower blue.

The Binnies were the first to come…“spying out the land,” Judy vowed. They heard May’s laughter far down the lane. “Ye always hear her afore ye see her, that one,” sniffed Judy. May was very gorgeous in a gown of cheap, mail-order radium lace that broke in billows around her feet and afforded a wonderful view of most of the bones in her spine. She tapped Pat condescendingly on the shoulder and said,

“You look dragged to death, darling. If I were you I’d stay in bed all day tomorrow. Ma always makes me do that after a spree.”

Pat shrugged away from that hateful, fat, dimpled hand with its nails stained coral. What an intolerable phrase…“if I were you”! As if a Binnie ever could be a Gardiner! She was thankful that the arrival of the Russells and Uncle Brian’s girls saved her from the necessity of replying. Winnie was looking like a girl again tonight, in spite of her two children. For there was a new baby at the Bay Shore and Judy was going to take care of it during the evening, as she loved to do.

Pat did not dance till late. There were too many things to see to. And even when she was free she liked better to stand a little in the background, where a clump of stately white foxglove spikes glimmered against the edge of the birches, and gloat over the whole scene. Everything was going beautifully. The dreamy August night seemed like a cup of fragrance that had spilled over. The gay lilt of Tillytuck’s fiddle rippled through the moonlight to die away magically, through green, enchanted boughs, into the beautiful silences of the silver bush and the misty, glimmering fields beyond. It was really a wonder that Wild Dick didn’t rise up out of his grave to dance to it.