He was, thank God! an American citizen.  The hat was now out of his hand and upon his head.  The conditions of his boyhood might, he thought, be forgotten in the conditions of his manhood.  But—­they would all be gathered in the drawing-room.  Should he speak first to Colonel Churchill as his host, or first to the ladies of the house, to Miss Churchill and Miss Dandridge?  If Miss Churchill or Miss Dandridge were at the harpsichord, should he wait at the door until the piece was ended?  He had a vision of a great space of polished floor reflecting candlelight, and of himself crossing that trackless desert beneath the eyes of goddesses and men.  The colour came into his face.  There were twenty things he might have asked Mr. Pincornet that night at Monticello.  He turned with hot impatience from the consideration of the usages of society, and fell to building with large and strong timbers the edifice of his future.  He built on while the dusk gathered, and he built while Joab helped him to dress, and he was yet busy with beam and rafter when at eight o’clock, with some help from the negro, he descended the stairs and crossed the hall to the parlour door.  How was he dressed?  He was dressed in a high-collared coat of blue cloth with eagle buttons, in cloth breeches and silk stockings, in shoes with silver buckles, and a lawn neckcloth of many folds.  His hair was innocent of powder, and cut short in what the period supposed to be the high Roman fashion.  It was his chief touch of the Republican.  In the matter of dress he had not his leader’s courage.  Abhorring slovenliness and the Jacobin motley, he would not affect them.  He was dressed in his best for this evening; and if his attire was not chosen as Ludwell Cary would have chosen, it was yet the dress of a gentleman, and it was worn with dignity.

Music was playing, as he paused at the half-open door,—­he could see Miss Dandridge at the harpsichord.  The room seemed very light.  For a moment he ceased to be the master-builder and sank to the estate of the apprentice, awkward and eaten with self-distrust; the next, with a characteristic abrupt motion of head and hand, he recovered himself, waved Joab aside, and boldly crossed the threshold.

Unity, at the harpsichord, was playing over, very rapidly, one after another, reels, hornpipes, jigs, and Congos, and looking, meanwhile, slyly out of velvet eyes at Fairfax Cary, who had asked for a particularly tender serenade.  He stood beside her, and strove for injured dignity.  It was a day of open courtship, and polite Albemarle watched with admiration the younger Cary’s suit to Miss Dandridge.  He had ridden alone to Fontenoy; his brother, who had business in Charlottesville, promising to join him later in the evening.  Mr. Ned Hunter, too, was at Fontenoy, and he also would have been leaning over the harpsichord but for the fact that Colonel Dick had fastened upon him and was demonstrating with an impressive forefinger the feasibility of widening into a highway fit for a mail-coach a certain forest track running over the mountains and through the adjoining county.  They stood upon the hearth, and Mr. Hunter could see Miss Dandridge only by much craning of the neck.  “Yes, yes,” he said vaguely, “it can easily be widened, sir.”