"Oh, don't go in, come on," remonstrated Stephen, trying to push on past the saloon.
"Why not?" said Katrine; "it's too early to go to bed. Come in, I'll pay," and before either of them could answer she had pushed open the door, and was holding it for them with one hand, while with the other she laid down three quarters on a small trestle inside, where an old man was sitting as doorkeeper.
It was a large oblong room, with a partition running half-way down the middle, dividing it into the front part, where they were standing and where the bar was, and the back part, which was strictly the dancing portion. Stephen sat down on a bench that faced the inner portion, with the determination of a man who was not to be moved from his seat. At the other side of the room was a low raised platform, where some very seedy-looking musicians were sawing out a jerky tune from their feeble violins. The room was fairly full, and a more heterogeneous collection of human beings Stephen thought he had never seen. There were miners in the roughest and thickest clothing, labourers, packers, a few Indians, some youths in extraordinary attempts at evening dress, some negro minstrels with real dress shirts on and diamond studs, girls with old velvet skirts and odd bodices that didn't match; and here and there, idling against the wall, looking on with absent eyes, one could find a different figure—that of student, or artist, or newspaper correspondent, or gentleman miner; one need not despair of finding almost any type of humanity in that room.
Talbot looked at the girl's bright sparkling face as they entered, and then without a word slipped his arm round her waist and they started over the rough wooden floor.
"You dance fine," observed Katrine, after a long silence, in which they had both given themselves up to the pleasure of mere motion. "I guess you have had lots of practice before you came out here."
Talbot smiled down into her admiring eyes.
"Yes," he said, thinking of the foreign embassies, the English ball-rooms, the many polished floors his feet had known, "in England."
"My! I expect you're a great swell!" remarked the saloon-keeper's daughter.
"All the same," he answered, laughing, "I have never had a partner that danced so perfectly as you do."
"Now that's real kind of you," answered Katrine, with a flush of pleasure, and then they gave themselves up to silent enjoyment again.