Flinging her white arms above her head, she danced into the middle of the lawn on slim, twinkling white feet and continued to dance all over it with the greatest abandon and enjoyment, while her long black plaits bumped joyously. So light of foot, so variously graceful in her gracious suppleness, with such divine gravity and dainty decorum that Mr. Wycherly watching was fain to take his glasses off and wipe them, for suddenly he could not see as clearly as he wished. Her radiant face was pale, but her wide eyes were full of a gladness that seemed to mirror back the brightness of that May afternoon, and the little petticoat was like the sheath of a flower enfolding and displaying all this happy grace. Loudly carolled the blackbird, lustily chirruped the thrush, and Jane-Anne danced to their orchestra, and while she danced her mind kept saying: "I’ve done with it; I’ve done with it. I shall never go back. Life is before me, a new life; a life full of wonders, and a bedroom to myself, with furniture like looking-glasses; a life with a kind, sensible, if worldly minded aunt, who gives to little girls delicious puddings that they like. A life with books in it, big books; not interesting, perhaps, but very grand and splendid to have lent one. A life that is to be lived under the same roof with a beautiful, kind old gentleman who will perhaps, by-and-bye, let me wait upon him. Oh, wonderful and delicious prospect, to wait upon Mr. Wycherly! To hand him his plate and to pour out—what should she pour out? Wine, she expected, though Miss Stukely said wine was wrong. Not, perhaps, for the gentry, for the _real_ gentry, as her aunt would say. How soft and warm the grass to the bare tripping feet! How kind of those birds to sing like that! How lovely it was to be young and light and to have got rid of heavy shoes and hot, uncomfortable frock. How——" It was the front door bell. Jane-Anne heard it and Mr. Wycherly did not. There certainly was the making of a quick-change artist in Jane-Anne. In a twinkling she had found her shoes and stockings and put them on, and she ran to the house struggling into her dress as she ran. "You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where has the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?" said Mr. Wycherly, wondering why she had stopped so suddenly. *CHAPTER XI* *THE CULT OF BRUEY* "The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures." _Poetics_, ARISTOTLE. Jane-Anne was a true Athenian in that she was ever ready to run after any new thing, and during her last two terms at the Bainbridge the strongest influence in her life was that of her Sunday-school teacher, Miss Stukely.