The ball at the Palace!—­he had forgotten it.  Flare of lights, wail of violins, a painted, silken crowd, laughter, whispers, magpie chattering, wine, and the weariness of the dance, when his soul would long to be with the night outside, with the rising wind and the shining stars.  He half determined not to go.  What mattered the offense that would be taken?  Did he go he would repent, wearied and ennuye, watching Evelyn, all rose-colored, moving with another through the minuet; tied himself perhaps to some pert miss, or cornered in a card-room by boisterous gamesters, or, drinking with his peers, called on to toast the lady of his dreams.  Better the dull room at Marot’s ordinary, or better still to order Mirza, and ride off at the planter’s pace, through the starshine, to Fair View.  On the river bank before the store MacLean might be lying, dreaming of a mighty wind and a fierce death.  He would dismount, and sit beside that Highland gentleman, Jacobite and strong man, and their moods would chime as they had chimed before.  Then on to the house and to the eastern window!  Not to-night, but to-morrow night, perhaps, would the darkness be pierced by the calm pale star that marked another window.  It was all a mistake, that month at Westover,—­days lost and wasted, the running of golden sands ill to spare from Love’s brief glass....

His mood had changed when, with the gathering dusk, he entered his room at Marot’s ordinary.  He would go to the Palace that night; it would be the act of a boy to fling away through the darkness, shirking a duty his position demanded.  He would go and be merry, watching Evelyn in the gown that Peterborough had praised.

When Juba had lighted the candles, he sat and drank and drank again of the red wine upon the table.  It put maggots in his brain, fired and flushed him to the spirit’s core.  An idea came, at which he laughed.  He bade it go, but it would not.  It stayed, and his fevered fancy played around it as a moth around a candle.  At first he knew it for a notion, bizarre and absurd, which presently he would dismiss.  All day strange thoughts had come and gone, appearing, disappearing, like will-o’-the-wisps for which a man upon a firm road has no care.  Never fear that he will follow them!  He sees the marsh, that it has no footing.  So with this Jack-o’-lantern conception,—­it would vanish as it came.

It did not so.  Instead, when he had drunken more wine, and had sat for some time methodically measuring, over and over again, with thumb and forefinger, the distance from candle to bottle, and from bottle to glass, the idea began to lose its wildfire aspect.  In no great time it appeared an inspiration as reasonable as happy.  When this point had been reached, he stamped upon the floor to summon his servant from the room below.  “Lay out the white and gold, Juba,” he ordered, when the negro appeared, “and come make me very fine.  I am for the Palace,—­I and a brown lady that hath bewitched me!  The white sword knot, sirrah; and cock my hat with the diamond brooch”—­