Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/183

This page needs to be proofread.
THE FIDDLER OF THE REELS
169

she was urged to fortify herself with more gin-and- beer; which she did, feeling very weak and overpowered with hysteris emotion, She refrained from unveiling, to keep Mop in ignorance of her presence, if possible. Several of the guests having left, Car’line hastily wiped her lips and also turned to go; but, according to the account of some who remained, at that very moment a five-handed reel was proposed, in which two or three begged her to join.

She declined on the plea of being tired and having to walk to Stickleford, when Mop began aggressively tweedling “My Fancy Lad,” in D major, as the air to which the reel was to be footed. He must have recognized her, though she did not know it, for it was the strain of all seductive atraing which she was least able to resist—the one he had played when she was leaning over the bridge at the date of their first acquaintance. Car'line stepped despairingly into the middle of the room with the other four.

Reels were resorted to hereabouta at this time hy the more robust spirits for the reduction of superfluous energy which the ordinary figure-dances were not powerful enough to exhaust. As everybody knows, or does not know, the five reelers stood in the form of a cross, the reel being performed by each line of three alternately, the persons who successively came to the middle place dancing in both directions. Car’line soon found herself in this place, the axis of the whele performance, and could not get out of it, the tune turning into the first part without giving her opportunity. And now she began to suspect that Mop did know her, and was doing this on purpose, though whenever she stole a glance at him his closed eyes betokened obliviousness to everything outside hia own brain. She continued to wend her way through the figure of eight that was formed by her course, the fiddler introduc-