Toward the end of March, a rider came through, an Indian trader who smelled ripely of sweat, unlaundered woolens, and some kind of fish oil. He spent a night in the barn, the weather being much improved by then, and passed the word at supper that there was a dance in the works over at Springwater. He’d been by to pay a call on the McCaffreys, he said, and they’d enjoined him to make sure and invite Scully and Evangeline and Abigail, should he see them in his travels. The date set for the festivities was three weeks away.

Scully surprised Evangeline profoundly the morning after the trader left. Standing in the open doorway, sipping from a mug of coffee and surveying the sea of loamy mud that was the front yard, he watched as she poured the milk into the separating machine, there on the porch, and spoke as if there had not been a strain between them since Christmas.

“We ought to go to that dance,” he said.

Evangeline was bent over, turning the separator handle. Following that, she would churn the cream into butter, to go with the fresh bread she was in the process of baking. The loaves were rising, already fragrant, in the warming oven over the stove. “What did you say?” she asked, though she’d heard him, of course. He was only a few feet away, after all, even if he might have been in China these past weeks, the way he kept to himself.

“I believe you heard me clearly,” he replied.

Exasperated and afraid and excited in a vast, terrible way, Evangeline straightened. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“Jacob’s a fair hand with a fiddle,” Scully answered, with the faintest hint of the old grin. “Besides, there’ll be a few folks there I’d like to say good-bye to, besides the McCaffreys.”

“You go, then,” Evangeline said, hating to think of their parting, which was now imminent. Big John might well arrive the following month, if the weather held, and when that happened, her private idyll would be forever at an end. “Abigail and I will stay right here.”

“Nonsense,” Scully countered, keeping his voice down, lest the little girl overhear. “You’re just being stubborn. Are you going to deprive that child of a chance to socialize a bit—maybe make a friend or two?”

Evangeline’s eyes burned. She told herself it was from too much knitting and sewing by lamplight. “I don’t know how to dance,” she said, careful not to look at Scully. “My husband didn’t countenance that sort of thing. He thought it was sinful.”

Scully gave a slight but unmistakable snort. “Sinful? He must have been a tiresome old coot,” he remarked, and finished off his coffee.

“He was a fine man,” Evangeline protested, out of loyalty more than conviction. Charles had indeed been a “tiresome old coot,” at least part of the time, but he’d been kind as well, and a good provider. He’d certainly never caused her the kind of emotional upheaval Scully had.