This New Year’s Eve remained, amid all the experiences of Lily, a thing apart. It became painful to her to think of it in after times, but in the present it was like a completion and climax of life, still all in the visionary stage, yet so close on the verge of the real that she became herself like an instrument, thrilling to every touch, answering every air that blew, every word that was said, in each and all of which there were meanings hidden of which none was aware but herself. There was the little dinner first, so carefully prepared by Katrin, so tenderly served by Beenie, the two young people sitting on either side of the table as if at their bridal banquet, while the sound of the festivities going on in the kitchen came up by times when the door was opened: a squeak of the fiddle, the sound of the stamping of the guisards as they performed their little archaic drama, adding a franker note of laughter to the keen supreme pleasure that reigned above. Beenie went and came, always bringing with her along with every new dish that little gust of laughter and voices from below, to which she kept open half an ear, while with the other she attended to what her little mistress said. “You maun come down, Miss Lily, to do them a grace: they a’ say they’ll no steer till they’ve seen the young leddy; and they’re decent lads just come out to play, as the bairns say in their sang, neither beggars nor yet stravaigers, but lads from the town, to please ye with their bit performance; and I ken a’ their mothers!” Beenie cried with a little outburst of affectionate emotion. When Lily went down accordingly, followed closely by her lover, the little primitive drama was repeated, with more stamping and shouting than ever; and then there was an endless reel, to the sound of the squeaking fiddle, in which Lily danced as long as she could hold out, and Beenie held out, as it seemed, forever, wearing out all the lads. “Eh! I was a grand dancer in my time,” she admitted, when she had breath enough, while the fiddle squeaked on and on. And then, as was right, Ronald said good-night as the rural band streamed away from the door. The curious group of the guisards, some of them in white shirts outside their garments, some in breastplates of tin, with an iron pot on their heads by way of helmet, “set him home” with much respectful kindness. “But I wuss ye were coming with us to the toun, for Tam the shepherd’s is no a howff for a gentleman,” they said.