The dancers crossed and recrossed, twisted each other about, beat each other breast against breast, and finally rolled each other round and round.
The music was going fast, and the dancers were singing loud and laughing louder, when there came from outside the sudden barking of dogs, followed by the clatter of the hoofs of a galloping horse. Immediately afterward there was the rattle of the metal end of a riding-whip against a window-pane, and a voice crying, "God be with you!"
The new-comer did not wait for the customary answer to his salutation, but pushed the door open and entered hurriedly. It was Magnus, dusty and dirty, with a white face and wild eyes.
At that moment Oscar and Helga, blushing and smiling, were in the middle of the floor, locked in each other's arms, performing the last figure of the dance, and it was thus that Magnus came face to face with them.
"Is she here?" he cried.
"She?"
"Thora! She is lost--I thought she might have found a horse and followed you."
Then the shuffling feet stopped, and the fiddles tailed off into silence as Magnus, in broken sentences, told the story of Thora's flight to the Factor's, her disappearance with the child, and the vain search that had been made for her.
"But surely she would go back to Government House eventually," said Oscar. "The poor girl would go the long way round to escape observation and home by way of the lake. Did nobody think of that, and stay in the house to see?"
Magnus looked like a man whose eyes, dulled by groping in a dark tunnel, had been stunned by sudden light. Before the others had recovered themselves he had turned about and was gone.