The feet of the girls were tapping the ground. The beggar's expression grew more genially provocative, and his eyeballs rolled more recklessly as he blew and blew; his time was perfect. The groom, who was dancing, began to compose steps on his own account. Suddenly there was a whirl of petticoats, and he had seized one of the girls round the middle. They spun and counter-spun; now loosing each other for the more serious business of each one's individual steps, now enlacing again, seeming flung together by some resistless elemental wind. The man's gaze, while he danced alone, was fixed on his own feet as though he were chiding them, admiring them, directing them through niceties which only himself could appreciate. His partner's hair came down and fell in a loop of dull copper-colour over her back. She was a finely-made girl, and each curve of her body seemed to be surging against the agitated sheath of her clothes. The odd-woman-out circled round the pair like a fragment thrown off by the spin of some travelling meteor. The passion for dancing that is even now part of the life of Angus had caught all three, let loose upon them by the piper's handling of sound and rhythm. In the full tide of their intoxication, a door in the high wall of the yard opened and Lord Balnillo came through it. The fragment broke from its erratic orbit and fled into the house with a scream; the meteor, a whirling twin-star, rushed on, unseeing. The piper, who saw well enough, played strong and loud; not the king himself could have stopped him in the middle of a strathspey. The yellow dog, on his feet among his reposing companions, showed a narrow white line between his lips, and the hackles rose upon his plebeian neck. "Silence!" cried Lord Balnillo. But the rest of his words were drowned by the yell of the pipes. As the dancers drew asunder again, they saw him and stopped. His wrath was centred on the beggar, and man and maid slunk away unrebuked. Wattie finished his tune conscientiously. To Balnillo, impotent in the hurricane of braying reeds, each note that kept him dumb was a new insult, and he could see the knowledge of that fact in the piper's face. As the music ceased, the beggar swept off his bonnet, displaying his disreputable bald head, and bowed like the sovereign of some jovial and misgoverned kingdom. The yellow dog's attitude forbade Balnillo's nearer approach. "Go!" shouted the judge, pointing a shaking forefinger into space. "Out with you instantly! Is my house to be turned into a house of call for every thief and vagabond in Scotland? Have I not forbidden you my gates? Begone from here immediately, or I will send for my men to cudgel you out!" But he leaped back, for he had taken a step forward in his excitement, and the yellow cur's teeth were bare. "A'm seekin' the painter-laddie," said the beggar, giving the dog a good-humoured cuff.