I led her to her place, but, as for me, I sat down, lost to mortal woes, silent and dazed, among the stars. "Didn't you want to sit with me?" said Vesty, her face rather grave. "Oh, why do you ask that?" "You looked, when they called our names, as though you didn't want to." Now I tried to dwell upon the words of Captain Leezur, but, however callous I succeeded in appearing on the outside, at heart I was a happy, happy bean-pole. "I was stunned," I said. "Besides, you see, I did not expect to be invited." "Why not, Major Henry?" Oh, the beautiful Basin! the beautiful Basin! I tried to speak, but could not. "You never seemed before," said she, a sea-shell color glowing in her cheeks, "to feel above us!" She felt humbled, and my poor brain was too dizzy and incredulous to frame fitting words. I swallowed hard; that was a Basin prerogative, and by exerting it a direct Basin inspiration seemed to come to me. "Feel above you! O Vesty!" At that the sea-shell color went away down low, even to her lips, but no further illumination came to me. Past ghostly hill and moor and still-gleaming flood we flew. "I am happy," I could say at last, "as I ought not to be. In all scenes and places where I may ever be I shall remember this, Vesty." She shivered a little. Ah! the sad old shawl! I clinched my hands. Past hill and moor and still-gleaming flood: the light of day changed to one unfathomed, possible, as of sweet, unspoken dreams becoming blessed at nightfall. Then all at once, round and full above a distant hill-top, rose the hoyden moon, and the Basins saluted her with shouts of natural delight, all save Vesty and I, who were silent. Now, I saw, was the hour when each Basin put his arm about his girl. I could not have touched my girl, not under all the rollicking moonbeams that ever fired the heart of youth and man. Farther she seemed to me than that far white hill-top, glittering and high. Yet it pierced me that it was a gloomy ride for her. "It was good and kind of them," I said, "to place a poor old fellow like me here beside you; but you should have one of those rosy, handsome lads with you; you so young, though we forget it. Your life is yet to live." At the reproach in her eyes--a look of anger, too, but for its wild and dark distress--my heart had almost leaped to my lips. But--too merry the rollickers, who had fallen behind us, driving on the homeward road; there had been several laughing, reckless adventures of overturned herring-boxes in the snow-drifts; now the pole attached to one of these had broken; the frightened horses had cleared themselves and were veering madly on the narrow road, with the swinging cross-bar, toward that side of the sled where my girl sat, unconscious of the danger, still and pale. I sprang, fell in a heap, but rose again somehow; and now at last I put up my arm. It was not without strength--in this case more than mortal strong--still, in the end, I fell.