What did it matter? What did anything matter? She was at the Party. Her new dress had been made by her mother's dressmaker. It had cost her hours of breathless standing, trying to keep still while that dignified lady crept round her on her knees, with pins in her mouth, for all the world as though she were only nine and a half like Connie, and were playing at bears. There had been a lengthy ceremony of dressing before the nursery fire, with Connie dancing around irrepressibly, wanting to try on Muriel's sandals and silk mittens, and to touch the soft folds of her sash. All the way to Kingsport, dangling her legs from the box-seat of the brougham--she always rode outside with Turner, because to sit inside made her sick--Muriel had watched the thin slip of a moon ride with her above the dark rim of the wolds, and she had sung softly to herself and to the moon and to Victoria, the old carriage horse, "I'm going to the Party, the Party, the Party." And here she was. The ecstasy caught and held her spellbound. Most of the chairs round the wall were full now. Mrs. Marshall Gurney had been seized upon by Mrs. Cartwright. "It's nearly time to begin dancing," said Muriel's mother. "We must get your programme filled. There are a lot of little boys here whom you know. Look, there's Freddy Mason. You remember him, dear, don't you?" Muriel remembered Freddy. Once, when they had all gone to tea at his father's farm, Freddy had taken Connie and her to play on the stacks. They had climbed a ladder--dizzy work this at the best of times, paralysing when Freddy followed close on one's heels, recounting grisly details of recent accidents. Half-way up, Muriel had felt her hands slip under the weight of a great sack of corn, and the earth sprang up to meet her before the grinding thud of her shoulder on the ground, when she fell as those poor men had fallen. She had scrambled fearfully across the slippery barley straw, shuddering from the pain of a fall that she had felt, although she still miraculously crouched on the top of the stack, instead of lying broken in the yard. She had sat with her legs hanging over space at the top of Freddy's lovely slide, clutching at the treacherous straw with desperate fingers, watching the hens, small as flies, pecking in the yard below, while fear tickled the soles of her feet, and fear breathed on her paling cheeks. Then, as merciful release or culminating agony, she was not sure which, Freddy had pushed her over, and she had dropped limply down, down, down, with a blinding rush, till she lay half buried in straw below the stack, past hope, past fear, past speech, past agony. That had been a long time ago. But she did not now want to dance with Freddy. "I don't think----" she began in her prim little voice. She was about to add--"that I want to dance with Freddy," when Mrs. Hammond finished her sentence for her.