"Mighty glad to see you, Sis' Roxy," cried Callista, welcoming the diversion, but looking with surprise at her sister-in-law's draggled gingham on which the night dews of Laurel Gulch lay thick, her grim visage, and her switch. "Polly--she was here a minute ago." But Polly, wise with the wisdom of her sex, had flown to Lance, and now she hid behind him, clinging like a limpet. "Come in, Sis' Roxy. We're proud to see you here," shouted Lance, with an impudent disregard of anything amiss, and a new householder's enthusiastic hospitality. "Did you send me word that you was a-goin' to have me call off the dances?" the widow demanded in an awful voice. Her scrapegrace brother laughed in her face. "That was jest a mighty pore joke, Sis' Roxy," he explained. "We-all was goin' to play some games, and I know you' a powerful good hand to get us started. Come on; fix the boys and gals like they ought to be for that"--he hesitated a little, frowning--"that play we used to have sometimes where they all stand up in couples, and--Wait, [137] I'll get my banjo and play a tune and you'll see what I mean." Lance had not lived his twenty-three years with his sister Roxy to fail now in finding her weak side. She loved lights, a crowd, as he did. True, she wished to harangue the crowd, and the lights must be to reveal her, playing the pictorially pious part; yet a Virginia Reel, disguised as a game, answered well to give her executive powers scope and swing, and they were in the thick of the fun when the women came from the other room. In the moments of her detention in that room, Ola had begun to find whether being bidden to a festivity really made one a guest. Rilly Trigg whispered apart to Callista, and looked out of the corners of her eyes at the newcomer. Lance's wife evidently reproved her for doing so, but a smile went with the words. Octavia Gentry spoke solemnly to the Derf girl, asking after the health of her parents in a tone so chilly that the outsider felt herself indefinitely accused. "I don't keer," she muttered to herself rebelliously, "hit's Lance's house. Lance ain't a-goin to th'ow off on old friends just becaze he's wedded." On the instant she entered the other room, and had sight of her host, flushed, laughing-eyed, his brown curls rumpled, the banjo in his lap, swaying to the rhythm of "Greenbacks," as Roxy Griever struggled to keep the boys and girls in an orderly [138] line while she showed them how to "Shake hands acrost-like." The dull little face lighted up. Here was something at which Ola felt she could help, a ground upon which she was equal to the best of them. "Hit's a reel!" she exclaimed joyously. "I'll call off for ye, Lance."