Now when the Wakes people come to Llanyglo, and the pleasant family parties yield place a little, and drive in the mountains more frequently, and leave the Pier and Promenade a little earlier, and gather more often at one another's hotels--even then that dancing-hall is so vast that twenty different elements can be accommodated there without mixing or encroachment. But that series of precipitations had not yet taken place. That night all was homogeneous. Perhaps here and there other contacts had sparsely "crossed," as it were, that fresh blooming, as the white hawthorn takes on faintly the hue of the pink in the spring, but that was probably rare. John Willie, had he had eyes for it, looked down upon a wonderful sight. The hall was a creamy gold, with bow after bow along its balcony tiers; without its other innumerable clusters of lights, the eight arc-lamps in its high roof would have lighted it no better than a railway station is lighted; and the mirrors on the walls were hardly more polished than its satiny floor. A fully appointed stage half-way down one of the sides held an orchestra of thirty performers; walking across that wonderfully swung floor you felt something almost alive under your feet; and four thousand feet moved upon it that night. It was beautiful. The band was playing, slowly, as is the dancing-fashion of the North, that Barn Dance; and almost every girl was in white. The whites were the whites of flowers--the greenish white of guelder-roses, the yellow white of elder or of meadow-sweet, the pinkish white of the faintest dog-rose, the dead white of narcissi, but little that was not white. And because of all that soft whiteness, faces caught by the sun were browner, and hair that the wind had blown through all day glossier, and eyes brighter, and perhaps blushes quicker and more readily seen. And to the whole bright spectacle was added the impressiveness of unfaltering rhythm and simultaneousness of movement. The Colour on the Horse Guards' Parade is not honoured with greater precision of physical movement than these disciplined feet, these turning bodies; the pulsing floor itself answered to the delicate dip of the conductor's stick. For two bars ... but look at them as they pour towards you down the left side of the room. Every face is towards you, forty abreast, and forty following those, and more forties, columns and squadrons of them, coming forward as grain comes down a channel, as graded fruit pours down a shoot. You do not see where they come from--their turn is far away under the pillars there; you do not see where they go to--they pass away out of sight again beneath you. They do not seem the same over and over again, but all the youths and maidens of the world, coming on and on, and new, always new.... Then you look to the right, and instantly your eyes are sensible of a darker ensemble. That is because you see, not faces now, but the backs of heads; not