“With whom did you dance, may I inquire?” I asked, for the thought of the Baroness von Ottringel dancing with the first comer in a foreign farm was of course most disagreeable to me. “Mr. Jellaby,” said she. “Do come.” “Jellaby? What is he doing there?” “Dancing. And so is everybody. They are all there. That’s why their caravans were so quiet. Do come.” And she ran out again, a childishly eager expression on her face, into the night. “Edelgard!” I called. But though she must have heard me she did not come back. Relieved, puzzled, vexed, and curious together, I did get up and dress, and on lighting a candle and looking at my watch I was astonished to find that it was only a quarter to ten. For a moment I could not credit my eyes, and I shook the watch and held it to my ears, but it was going, as steadily as usual, and all I could do was to reflect as I dressed on what may happen to you if you go to bed and to sleep at seven o’clock. And how soundly I must have done it. But of course I was unusually weary, and not feeling at all well. Two hours’ excellent sleep, however, had done wonders for me so great are my recuperative powers, and I must say I could not help smiling as I crossed the yard and went up to the house at the remembrance of Menzies-Legh’s glass of tea. He would not see much milk about me now, thought I, as I strode, giving my moustache ends a final upward push and guided by the music, into the room in which they were dancing. The dance came to an end as I entered, and a sudden hush seemed to fall upon the company. It was composed of boys and young girls attired in evening garments next to which the clothes of the caravaners, weather-beaten children of the road, looked odd and grimy indeed. The tender lady, it is true, had put on a white and cobwebby kind of blouse, which together with her short walking skirt and the innocent droop of her fair hair about her little ears made her look at the most eighteen, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh had tricked herself out in white too, producing indeed for our admiration a white skirt as well as a white blouse, and achieving at the most by these efforts an air of (no doubt spurious) cleanliness; but the others were still all spattered and disfigured by the muddy accumulations of the past day. Though they stopped dancing as I came in I had time to receive a photograph on my mind’s eye of the various members of our party: of Jellaby, loose-collared and wispy-haired, gyrating with poor Frau von Eckthum, of Edelgard, flushed with childish enjoyment, in the grip of a boy who might very well have been her own if I had married her a few years sooner and if it were conceivable that I could ever have produced anything so undeveloped and half-grown, and of, if you please, Menzies-Legh in all his elderliness, dancing with an object the short voluminousness of whose clothing proclaimed a condition of unripeness even greater than that of the two fledglings--dancing, in a word, with a child.