"Sam!" I gasped, with emotional indignation that had a decided trace of joy.
"Yes, I feel that way, too," answered Sam, roughing my hair slightly with his chin as both his hands were employed holding me to him while we slid and skidded and slid again. "I don't forgive you; I never shall," I said, haughtily, as I drew away from him the fraction of an inch that came very near making us collide with Sue and Billy, who were dancing wildly, but in perfect accord.
"You'll have to when you hear the worst," answered Sam, as he firmly pressed my shoulder into his while he manoeuvered me first past Edith and Tolly and then across right in front of Pink Herriford, who weighs all of two hundred, dancing with Julia Buford, who must tip the scales at one hundred and sixty. It was a hairbreadth rapture of escape.
"Is anything the matter with the cows or anybody else?" I demanded, anxiously, from his shoulder.
"Worse!"
"Oh, Sam, has anything died at The Briers?"
"Worse," he answered again, while he defied Tolly with a double cross and then took a chance with Pink and Julia as I pressed him closer with my arms and my questions.
"Dance me out on the porch through the window and tell me, Sam," I demanded.
"Not when this music and Julia and Pink hold out like that, Bettykin. It'll be bad enough when you do hear it," answered Sam, laughing down at me with the same wide-mouthed smile he had always used on me when holding something over my head and making me reach up for it. "Besides, it has been two whole weeks since I've—had you," he added, and again his strong arms cradled as well as guided. Getting back into some people's atmosphere is like recovering the use of a lung a person had temporarily lost; breathing improves. I've always breathed easily in Sam's friendship. That was why I could dance with him as I did even up to the last bar of the music. Then he swung me out through one of the long windows on to the porch under the dusky spring starlight.
"I hate to tell you, Betty, though I have walked a five-mile blister on my left heel in these dancing-shoes just to break the news to you," Sam answered my repeated demand to be told his "worse."