The moon was an hour high.  Fifty years back from the gate stood the house, under its noble grove.  The road ran in front, and then came the grass-grown levee and the insatiate river beyond.  Just above the levee top a tiny red light was creeping down and a tiny green one was creeping up.  Then the passing steamers saluted, and the hoarse din startled the drowsy silence of the melancholy lowlands.  The stillness returned, save for the little voices of the night—­the owl’s recitative, the capriccio of the crickets, the concerto of the frogs in the grass.  The piccaninnies and the dawdlers from the quarters had been dismissed to their confines, and the melee of the day was reduced to an orderly and intelligent silence.  The six coloured waiters, in their white jackets, paced, cat-footed, about the table, pretending to arrange where all was beyond betterment.  Absalom, in black and shining pumps posed, superior, here and there where the lights set off his grandeur.  And Grandemont rested in his chair, waiting for his guests.

He must have drifted into a dream—­and an extravagant one—­for he was master of Charleroi and Adele was his wife.  She was coming out to him now; he could hear her steps; he could feel her hand upon his shoulder—­

“Pardon moi, M’shi Grande”—­it was Absalom’s hand touching him, it was Absalom’s voice, speaking the patois of the blacks—­“but it is eight o’clock.”

Eight o’clock.  Grandemont sprang up.  In the moonlight he could see the row of hitching-posts outside the gate.  Long ago the horses of the guests should have stood there.  They were vacant.

A chanted roar of indignation, a just, waxing bellow of affront and dishonoured genius came from Andre’s kitchen, filling the house with rhythmic protest.  The beautiful dinner, the pearl of a dinner, the little excellent superb jewel of a dinner!  But one moment more of waiting and not even the thousand thunders of black pigs of the quarter would touch it!

“They are a little late,” said Grandemont, calmly.  “They will come soon.  Tell Andre to hold back dinner.  And ask him if, by some chance, a bull from the pastures has broken, roaring, into the house.”

He seated himself again to his cigarettes.  Though he had said it, he scarcely believed Charleroi would entertain company that night.  For the first time in history the invitation of a Charles had been ignored.  So simple in courtesy and honour was Grandemont, and, perhaps, so serenely confident in the prestige of his name, that the most likely reasons for the vacant board did not occur to him.

Charleroi stood by a road travelled daily by people from those plantations whither his invitations had gone.  No doubt even on the day before the sudden reanimation of the old house they had driven past and observed the evidences of long desertion and decay.  They had looked at the corpse of Charleroi and then at Grandemont’s invitations, and, though the puzzle or tasteless hoax or whatever the thing meant left them perplexed, they would not seek its solution by the folly of a visit to that deserted house.