Lyddon looked, listened, and quietly relished this all-embracing family affection. It was something so new to him. In England, the law of primogeniture set a ban upon it. He knew something of the antagonism between the incumbent and the heir, of the niggardliness toward younger sons and daughters, and the inconvenience of a large jointure upon an estate. But here everything was different. Like the patriarchs of old all shared alike. After supper they went back to the hall where, according to the custom established when Angela was a little girl, Mrs. Tremaine played the piano in the drawing-room while out in the hall Angela and Archie danced polkas, waltzes, and schottisches. Colonel Tremaine and his two elder sons with Lyddon, sitting around the fire, listened to the quiet music and watched Angela’s willowy figure as she floated around the hall with Archie, who, short and stocky, yet danced beautifully. Outside on the back porch could be heard the shuffling of feet. It was Jim Henry with Lucy Anne, whose business was to keep the flies off of “ole Missus,” as Mrs. Tremaine was called, in the summer, and to bring the eggs in from the chicken houses in the winter, and Mirandy, whose sole occupation was to hunt for “ole Marse’s” specks, and Sally, whose business no one exactly knew, were disporting themselves in the dance. Presently Neville turned and asked, “Have you two children learned to dance the French two-step?” Angela and Archie had never heard of it before, but immediately Angela seized Neville and, dragging him from his comfortable corner on the old sofa, obliged him to teach her the new dance. In two minutes she had acquired it; her sense of rhythm was perfect, and for ten minutes she and Neville danced around the hall together. He was a good dancer, doing his steps with military precision, but nothing like so exquisitely graceful as the red-haired Archie. Lyddon, who had been accustomed to seeing Angela skipping about the hall with Archie, realized that she was now a woman grown and almost as tall as Neville, but among them all she was yet treated as a child, and when she begged Neville for a second dance he tweaked her ear and told her to go and dance with Archie; he himself was too old to dance with children.