Not Lawrence this time but Louis Pender had spoken. He stood close to Joanna, and begged like a lively child who fears the loss of a long-promised treat. And Joanna, blushing deeply with pleasure laughed and yielded.

She gave her hand to Urquhart who was clenching his black, mortified brows. Only to please this other was he accepted!

Although a couple was wanted almost where they stood, he set off with her to the far end of the room. It was some satisfaction to him that he was really dragging her there; but he suffered too all the way from the hateful reluctance of her body. She was humiliated by his knowledge that she desired to dance before the other man. But by her backward drag on his arm she thrust him down so far below herself that her humiliation was a triumph compared with his.

Still he plodded on, his head forward and hanging a little. And they had barely got to their places when the band let fly with the tune.

To Joanna’s great astonishment Urquhart danced well. It was the last thing she had expected of him; but he sprang featly to music, and his body was delivered by the steady rhythm from all stiffness and self-consciousness. As he passed and re-passed her in the figure of eight, taking the first one of her hands and then the other; as he placed his own hands on his slight hips or raised them high above his head; as he swung his partners round, each time lifting them clean off the floor; above all as he came to go through his complicated steps facing Joanna, gravely leaping on his small Highland feet; the young man was wholly possessed. He had to the full that tranced and happy seriousness which is the spirit of a national dance.

From the outset he caught Joanna up into something of his own dignity, winning her surprised acknowledgment. Then, as the reel progressed, she began to lose all sense of identity. Every moment she became less herself, more a mere rhythmical expression of the soil from which they both had sprung. The memory dawned in her of some far back ancestress, of whom unheedingly she had heard her mother tell. Fresh, dim, sweet like dawn, she could see the Stirlingshire farmer’s daughter carrying the milk-pails at sunrise and at sunset to the Castle on its hill. She could hear the swinging clink of the pails, could smell the spilt, clover-sweet milk, while the farmer’s daughter gave her lips to the young, unknown Welsh soldier who kept the drawbridge. She was that lass, that meeting, without which her being would not have been. And soon she was not even these. Beneath the candid darkness of Lawrence Urquhart’s face, soon she was no more than a field of barley that swings unseen in the wind before dawn.