'There!' said he, taking her hand in the same warm firm grasp she had known before. 'I am going to ask you to promise me something—that it will not be pleasant to promise. Miss Hazel'—speaking low and slowly—'do not dance round dances any more!'
The tone was low, also it was very earnest and very grave.
'What?' she said, in a sort of but half comprehending way. 'Why not? what is the matter with them? I am hardly the least bit tired.'
'You don't know!' he said, with a slight pressure of the hand he held. 'You don't know. This is why not, Miss Hazel—that I would not see my sister in them. Do you understand?'
'O yes,' she answered. 'I have seen people before who did not like dancing,—two or three, perhaps. But there is always somebody to dislike everything, I think. You do not enjoy it yourself, Mr. Rollo,—and so you do not know.'
'I have danced twenty dances where you have danced one. I know what they are made of. You only know how they look.'
'Hardly that,' said Wych Hazel. 'I know a little how they feel. I have never had an outside view, I believe.'
'Can you do me the great honour to take my view,—and my word for it?'
'If you liked flying to music as well as I do, you would take mine,' she said. 'Air is better than earth, when you can get it.'
'Do you think I would wish to interfere with your pleasure, or presume to interfere with your actions, without reasons so strong that I can hardly express their significance? Believe me, if you knew these round dances as well as I know them, you would never be mixed up in one of them any more.'