"Come, my beloved, haste away, Cut short the hours of thy delay. Fly like a youthful hart or roe Over the hills where spices grow." Julia had gone upstairs with the sleepy Peter-bird, who had been enjoying his first experience of late hours on the occasion of Nancy's coming out; the rest of the young folks were gathered in a group under the elms, chatting in couples,--Olive and Ralph Thurston, Kathleen and Cyril Lord, Nancy and Tom Hamilton. Then they parted, Tom Hamilton strolling to the country hotel with the young school teacher for companion, while Olive and Cyril walked across the fields to the House of Lords. It was a night in a thousand. The air was warm, clear, and breathlessly still; so still that not a leaf stirred on the trees. The sky was cloudless, and the moon, brilliant and luminous, shone as it seldom shines in a northern clime. The water was low in Beulah's shining river and it ran almost noiselessly under the bridge. While Kathleen and Julia were still unbraiding their hair, exclaiming at every twist of the hand as to the "loveliness" of the party, Nancy had kissed her mother and crept silently into bed. All night long the strains of The Tempest ran through her dreams. There was the touch of a strange hand on hers, an altogether new touch, warm and compelling. There was the gay trooping down the centre of the barn in fours,--some one by her side who had never been there before,--and a sensation entirely new and intoxicating, that whenever she met the glance of her partner's merry dark eyes she found herself at the bottom of them. Was she a child when she heard Osh Popham cry: "Take your partners for The Tempest!" and was she a woman when he called: "All promenade to seats!" She hardly knew. Beulah was a dream; the Yellow House was a dream, the dance was a dream, the partner was a dream. At one moment she was a child helping her father to plant the crimson rambler, at another she was a woman pulling a rose from the topmost branch and giving it to some one who steadied her hand on the trellis; some one who said "Thank you" and "Good-night" differently from the rest of the world. Who was the young stranger? Was he the Knight of Beulah Castle, the Overlord of the Yellow House, was he the Yellow Peril, was he a good bird to whom Mother Carey's chicken had shown the way home? Still the dream went on in bewildering circles, and Nancy kept hearing mysterious phrases spoken with a new meaning,--"Will you dance with me?" "Doesn't the House of Carey need another prop?" "Won't you give me a rose?" and above all: "You sent your love to any one of the Hamilton children who should be of the right size; I was just the right size, and I took it!"