With a swift little movement the girl turned a glowing face to the man standing before her. Flushed with dancing, keyed high in the pleasure and triumphs of the evening, she turned the same radiant face to Stuart Williams as he claimed their dance that she would have turned to almost anyone claiming a dance. It was something that came to life in the man's eyes as he looked down into her flushed face, meeting her happy, shining eyes, that arrested the flashing, impersonal smile of an instant before and underneath that impersonal gladness of youth there was a faint flutter of self. He was of the "older crowd;" it happened that she had never danced with him before. He was a better dancer than the boys of her own set, but somehow that old impersonal joy in dancing was a lesser thing now than the sense of dancing with this man. "That was worth coming for," he said quietly, when the dance and the encore to it were over and they found themselves by one of the doors opening out on the balcony. She looked up with a smile. It was a smile curiously touched with shyness. He saw the color wavering in her sensitive, delicate face. Then he asked lightly: "Shall we see what's being dispensed from this punch-bowl?" With their ice, they stood looking out into the moonlight over a wide stretch of meadow to far hills. "A fine night to ride over the hills and far away," he laughed at last, his voice lingering a little on the fancy. She only laughed a little in reply, looking off there toward over the hills and far away. Watching her, he wondered why he had never thought anything much about her before. He would have said that Ruth Holland was one of the nice attractive girls of the town, and beyond that could have said little about her. He watched the flow of her slender neck into her firm delicate little chin, the lovely corners of her mouth where feeling lurked. The fancy came to him that she had not settled into flesh the way most people did, that she was not fixed by it. He puzzled for the word he wanted for her, then got it--luminous was what she was; he felt a considerable satisfaction in having found that word. "Seems to me you and Edith Lawrence grew up in a terrible hurry," he began in a slow, teasing manner. "Just a day or two ago you were youngsters racing around with flying pigtails, and now here you are--all these poor young chaps--and all us poor old ones--fighting for dances with you. What made you hurry so?" he laughed. The coquette in most normal girls of twenty rose like a little imp up through her dreaming of over the hills and far away. "Why, I don't know," she said, demurely; "perhaps I was hurrying to catch up with someone."