Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/44

Rh "Oh," she said, looking up at him with a smile, and the sincerity of her voice made this one of the shining moments of his life, "I love to do this for you. And it's such a little thing!"

But Floyd insisted that the lesson should end; he led her out and danced with her, and she told him he was a credit to his teacher. Then some one came and took her away from him, and Floyd was introduced to other girls. He tried to dance with them, but they gave a scooping sort of motion to their bodies as they glided; it was a new thing in Boston that winter, and the girls were emulating one another in the practice of it. Lydia had not attempted it, and it introduced into the waltz a problem with which Floyd could not cope. He adopted Lydia's gentle, apologetic phrase, "I'm sorry; I don't seem able to dance that nice way you do;" and then, having drawn a good-natured laugh from his partner, he felt a humorous shame at the success of his second-hand utterance. Most of the time he stood in the doorway among the superfluous boys. Lydia had become immensely popular; in the intermissions boys swarmed about her; as she danced, she slanted laughs right and left, her cheeks glowed with a richer color, a tendril of hair, shaken down, hung at her temple, curling round into her face; at a sudden turn of her head it fluttered across her laugh caressingly. Floyd would have liked to dance with her again, but he felt it would be hardly fair; already she had given him a good part of her evening, and now to ask her to bump round with him when she was finding so many better partners—no, he wouldn't ask her. But finally she sent for him, pretended to be aggrieved because he had not come of his own accord, and said that she was n't engaged for the next waltz. With all his blundering, that dance made a happy climax to his evening.

The next morning he came into his room after a ten o'clock lecture and found Stewart bending over his drawing-board.