‘Oh, Miss Rosa, you are good! Larry, why don’t you thank the young lady, and say how proud you shall be to dance alongside of her?’
But Larry said nothing. He reddened, it is true, but more from confusion than pleasure, and he was so long a time settling Lizzie to his satisfaction, that Rosa was disposed to be angry at his dilatoriness, and called out to him sharply that if he were not ready she should open the ball with some one else. Then he ran and took his place by her side, and went through the evolutions of ‘down the middle’ and ‘setting at the corners’ with a burning face and a fast-beating heart. Poor Laurence Barnes! His young mistress’s constant presence in the stables and familiarity with himself had been too much for his susceptible nature. She was to him, in the pride of her youthful loveliness and the passport it afforded her for smiling upon all classes of men, as an angel, rather than a woman, something set too high above for him ever to reach, but yet with the power to thrill his veins and make his hot blood run faster. The touch of her ungloved hand in the figures of the dance made him tremble, and the glance of her eyes sickened him, so that as soon as the terrible ordeal was concluded he made her an awkward salute, and rushed from her side to that of the beer barrel, to drown his excitement in drink. And it was just there that he had left Lizzie Locke.
‘That was beautiful, Larry,’ she exclaimed, with glowing cheeks. ‘I could hear the sound of your feet and Miss Rosa’s above all the others, even when you went to the further end of the barn. It must be lovely to be able to dance like that. But it has made you thirsty, Larry. That’s the third glass, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, lass, it’s made me thirsty. But don’t you keep counting my glasses all the evening, or I shall move your chair a bit further off.’
She laughed quietly, and he flung himself upon the ground and rested his arm upon her knee. He seemed to feel safer and more at peace when by Lizzie’s side, and she was quite happy in the knowledge that he was there. The Mavis Farm party did not dance again after the ball had been opened, at least Miss Rosa did not. But she moved about the barn restlessly. Sometimes she was in, and sometimes she was out. She did not seem to know her own mind for two minutes together.
‘Why is that fellow Darley skulking about here, Larry?’ demanded Isaac Barnes of his nephew. ‘I’ve seen his ugly face peeping into the barn a dozen times. Why don’t he come in or stay out? I hate such half-and-half sneaking ways.’
Larry muttered an oath, and was about to make some reply, when George Murray came up to them.
‘Is that Mr Darley I see hanging about the barn door, Isaac?’ he inquired of their own keeper.
‘That it be, Master George; and as I was just saying to Larry here, why not in or out? What need of dodging? He don’t want to catch no one here, I suppose?’
‘He’d better try. I’d soon teach him who the barn belongs to.’