The girls had not intended to have a dancing party, but there was no resisting the waltz into which the long fingers fell, inviting the keys to magic, all feet to motion.
Ralph danced, with Happie first, with Laura, and then with Happie's friends, but as he turned, with Edith Charleford as a partner, his eyes caught little Serena's across Edith's shoulder, so bright, so unchildlike in their beauty and wistfulness that Ralph's big heart went out to her with a bound.
"Poor little thing! Sitting there so patiently!" he thought. "The girls say she is a fairy dancer! I wonder why I shouldn't be decent to her as I would be to any other forlorn mite? She can't help being my cousin, and she doesn't know she is; she's too little to know about family feuds anyway. She looks as though she were bearing the burden of Mrs. Jones-Dexter's misbehavior. I should think the Jewish scapegoat might have looked like that when it was a kid. I never saw such wistful eyes." Ralph laughed at his fancy about the youthful scapegoat, and Edith stopped dancing imperatively.
"I wonder what you will be when you are an old man?" she exclaimed pettishly, being accustomed to attention whenever her prettiness demanded it. "You are as absent-minded as if you had been vivisected, and your mind taken out. I have spoken to you three times and you haven't heard me! and just how you laughed, when there was nothing to laugh at!"
"There certainly isn't, when a fellow is rude to a girl, and Happie's best friend at that," said Ralph contritely, though his implication that Edith derived part of her importance from Happie was not flattering. "I beg your pardon, but the truth is I was engrossed in that little girl over there, the child that isn't well, and if you will excuse me I think I'll go over and try to get her to look less like sixty and more like six, which is her age, I believe."
He led Edith to a chair with perfect certainty that he was to be released, and Edith stared at him in amazement. "Well, you are an extraordinary boy!" she gasped. "But I don't mind your rudeness at all. I think it is rather nice of you to be interested in that child. Yes, I'll excuse you."
"Thank you," said Ralph calmly, and walked over to little Serena.
"Not much fun sitting still, is it, little lady?" he asked in a way he had which made all children go to him like butterflies to blossoms, the secret of the true child-lover which cannot be imitated nor taught.
"I love to dance," said Serena wistfully.
"Will you dance with me?" asked Ralph.