“Nay, I don’t know,” she answered, still hiding behind the door. “Old folks is easy put about, but he’ll not be strange long.” Her own confidence had been sadly shaken by the failure of the meal, and then suddenly she had remembered the room upstairs. They ought to have known that coming home made people sorry as well as glad, but the night when it came would bring its special peace. To-morrow they would look back and wonder what had gone awry.... But she did not want to remind Thomas of that upstairs room. He would be telling his father before he could be stopped, clumsily forestalling the first effect. So she listened in silence and let him worry away, pushing his cap further and further to the back of his puzzled head. All she did was to hide behind the door, and say in the pause that “he wouldn’t be strange long.” And then, after all, the change had come about long before there was any sign of night. Thomas couldn’t help feeling terribly set up because at last he had thought of the tactful thing to say. It was true that it was Agnes who had suggested the dance, but the opening remark about the fiddle had been his. They should have turned the talk upon fiddles long before, and then perhaps they would have had a decent meal. The old man’s trouble, whatever it had been, seemed to have slipped right away now that he was about to give them a tune. The very look of him had altered, almost out of belief. His eyes were young again and his movements were certain and brisk. He leaned against the table with the fiddle under his chin, trying the single notes with his finger and the chords with his fine bow. The fiddle answered him in a full, penetrating voice, ringing loud in the airy house that had no neighbour but the sea. He bent his ear to it and fixed his eyes on the strings, his whole being absorbed by the presence behind the voice.... “I doubt there’s not over much room.” Thomas gave the last piece of furniture a final shove. “There’s not that many on us, though, to get in each other’s road. I reckon we don’t need Harry Dixon’s barn.” “There’s nowt like a dance in a barn.” Kit spoke dreamily, without so much as lifting his head. “There it be, all light and laughing inside, and outside all the gert night looking in through the doors. It’s summer, happen, wi’ folk coming through the meadow-grass, holding their gowns to keep’em off the dew. An’ t’others coming along the lanes, wi’ the sound o’ beck-water rushing by.” “Ay. Yon’s how it was,” Thomas said gently. “Wasn’t it, lass?” “Ay,” Agnes said, and sighed. “A bonny time!” “There’s bettermer times now,” he insisted stoutly, but she shook her head. She knew already that there were no “bettermer” times.