"Then where is she?" Mrs Blain cried out, and opened green eyes rather wild. It seemed they danced like a whirling funnel.

"She's gone, you'll discover."

"Nowhere to be come upon?" the cook wailed, and pushed that spiralling orderly away at arm's length until, she felt, the girl revolved about her like a wisp of kitchen paper. "Lost?" she yelled, but it was drowned by music. "What's this? So that was it, then? Oh, you wicked things."

"Not to do with me, Mrs Blain," the orderly gently protested, given over to her shivering, glazed senses.

"Wicked deceivers," the woman said, in a calmer voice. "I'll have my enquiries to make on that, all right."

"We think it's pretty rotten of her to want to spoil this heaven evening."

"Well then," the cook said, quietened at once, and folded the child to an enormous bosom. Upon which both gave their two selves over, entire. As they saw themselves from shut eyes, they endlessly danced on, like horns of paper, across warm, rustling fields of autumn fallen leaves.

Quite soon, girls began to cut in. While Inglefield kept the instrument hard at it, the original partners began to break up, to step back over the wax mirror floor out of one another's arms, moving sideways by such as would not be parted yet, each to tap a second favourite on a bare, quiet shoulder. Then the girl so chosen would give a little start, open those great shut eyes, much greater than jewels as she circled and, circling yet, would dip into these fresh limbs which moved already in the dance, disengaging thus to leave her first choice to slip sideways in turn past established, whirling partners until she found another who was loved and yet alone.

Less satisfactory was the crush of fortune hunting children, with more fabulous gems for eyes, round Baker and Miss Edge, both of whom affected to ignore their riches as, oblivious yet well aware, they danced out together the dull year that was done. One after the other they would be tapped on a hard, black garmented back. But, as was traditional on these occasions, they lingered in one another's orbit, until at last Edge had had enough. When that moment came she simply opened eyes, from which long years had filched the brilliants, said "Why Moira," in simulated wonder, and so chose this child who, of all the suitors, was the first she saw in her hurried tiredness.

"Oh, ma'am," the girl said, delighted, while they drifted off on music, Moira leading.

"Isn't it wonderful?" the child asked, when she proudly noted the Principal had once more closed her eyes.

"I could go on for ever," she murmured further, when there was no response.

Then, as was usual at these Dances, but which came, as it always did, in all parts of the room at one and the same time because it occurred to almost everyone at once, there was mooted the project of a gift to their Principals.

"Why don't we get up a sub for Edgey and Bakers?"

"I think we ought to do something for both. They're sweet."

"This is too marvellous. We must manage a present in return."

"Ma'am," said Moira to the dreaming guv'nor like a black ostrich feather in her arms. "You're wonderful. So good."

The music was a torrent, to spread out, to be lost in the great space of this mansion, to die when it reached the staff room to a double beat, the water wheel turned by a rustling rush of leaf thick water. It was so dispersed and Winstanley, seated alongside Sebastian, could, for the conversation of her fellow teachers, hear no breath, neither the whispering in the joists from a distant slither of three hundred pairs of shoes, nor the cold hum of violins in sharp, moonstruck window glass. She did not know until Sebastian, who could not tell why, other than that he was restless, got up to open a door, when at once she realised the house had come to life, and recognised the reason. He would never listen for me, she accused Elizabeth.

It came to all the staff along the outside passage, first as a sort of jest, a whispered doublemeaning almost, then as a dance master's tap in time with music. After which, at any rate for the women, a far rustling of violins once recognised called as air, beaten through stretched feathers, might have spoken to the old man's goose, that long migratory flight unseen. So they rose, as Ted had never yet, and, with a burst of nasal conversation, made haste toward their obligations in the excitement of a year's end; not without a sense of dread in every breast which, in Sebastian's case was even more, for him it was the violin conjured, sibilant, thin storm of unease about a halting heart.

While they hurried closer the whole edifice began to turn, even wooden pins which held the panelling noiselessly revolved to the greater, ever greater sound. Thus they almost ran to their appointment, so giddy they were fit to tumble down; but, once in the room, paired off quietly, decently as best they might.

Sebastian stood against a wall, Winstanley could only take on Marchbanks, and Dakers was left with the last woman he would have picked.

"He's here," Miss Rock said to her grandfather, but he did not catch on.

"Care? Of course I care," he replied, in the deepest voice. Yet she took her hand out of his, was slipping from his arms.

She detached herself and, not unnoticed, made her way to where the young man waited. As for Mr Rock, when he saw himself abandoned, he moved clumsily over to the dais. Moira steered past with Miss Edge, whose eyes were tight closed. The child's lips sent "Later," at him, and he read them. Then, when he reached the sort of throne he had picked out, he climbed up and sat himself heavily where none but the Principals had a right to be seated. He was proud.

It was such a grand sight Mr Rock was almost glad he had attended.

Miss Winstanley noticed Elizabeth make for Sebastian, and it turned her sick as she circled about Marchbanks.

"How are you, dear?" she asked the older woman, thinking of herself.

Miss Marchbanks danced with great concentration, and the little smile of a martyr.

"Thank you, my shoulders are broad enough," she replied.

"There is something presumptuous in all this," Winstanley said of the evening with what was, for her, an unusually sad voice. She was watching Elizabeth give herself over, dance as one with Sebastian, deep in his arms. They moved as though their limbs had mutual, secret knowledge, were long acquainted cheek to cheek; the front of their thighs kissed through clothes; an unconscious couple which fired burning arrows through gasping music at her.

"Our dear girls must have a marvellous time," Marchbanks volunteered, with conviction. "But if you spoke of Mr Rock, the uninvited guest, then you knew of this fresh honour, that he is to be elected? I expect he feels sure of himself now."

The repetition of the beat, and her lazy misery about Sebastian, began to make Winstanley drowse.

"How goes your head?" she asked again.

There was a silence between them. Then Marchbanks murmured, "I'm so used to my heads I don't notice."

"There's anaesthesia in a valse."

"But I do wonder time and again, dear," Miss Marchbanks dreamily answered. "Do we not meet this modern music the same way, in the old days, as they used to go to fairs? You will have read of it. People plunging into the hurly-burly to forget their miserable condition, their worries."

"Ah, they weren't fools, then, they seldom are," Winstanley said at random, and shut her eyes tight. Through a blinding headache Miss Marchbanks guided the younger woman, who still had hope.