He was conscious of a quick catch in her breath.

Her eyes met his for an instant searchingly.
"Yes; I have done it," he answered, and looked at her wonderingly.
A moment later he had made his peace with Mrs.Owen and paid his compliments to Mrs.Bassett at the favor table, heaped high with beribboned hatchets and bunches of cherries for the first figure.
Morton Bassett had heard praise of his daughter from many lips, but he watched her joyous course through the cherry-tree figure in the german with an attention that was not wholly attributable to fatherly pride.
Harwood's white-gloved hand led her hither and thither through the intricate maze; one must have been sadly lacking in the pictorial sense not to have experienced a thrill of delight in a scene so animate with grace, so touched with color.

It was ungracious to question the sincerity of those who pronounced Marian the belle of the ball when Colonel Ramsay, the supreme authority in Hoosier pulchritude, declared her to be the fairest rose in a rose-garden of girls.

He said the same thing to the adoring parents of a dozen other girls that night.

(The Colonel was born in Tecumseh County, on our side of the Ohio, and just plays at being a Kentuckian!) Mothers of daughters, watching the dance with a jealous eye on their own offspring, whispered among themselves that as likely as not Marian's tall, broad-shouldered cavalier was the man chosen of all time to be her husband.