I did not answer him at once, and whilst I plied knife and fork for the sake of appearances, I would think upon what he had discovered.  This reappearance of Francis Falconnet was not to be passed over lightly.  What would he do, or seek to do?  Nay, what devilish thing was it he might not do?  If the fire had burned his passion out, it had doubtless kindled a feller blaze of revenge.  And if his thirst was for vengeance, how could he quench it in a deeper draft than by harrying the woman we both loved?  ’Twas only by a mighty effort that I could drag myself back to Dick’s urging and the needs of the hour.

“To have some chance of hearing gossip to our purpose, we must make shift to gain admittance to this officers’ rout at the manor house,” I said.

“The devil!” quoth Dick, “I venture that’s easier said than done—­for two plain country gentlemen.”

“Never fear; there will be others there lacking fine clothes, and so the throng be great enough, we may pass current in it.”

Richard pushed his plate back with a grimace of disgust.

“Let us be at it, then.  Another grapple with this pig-bait will finish me outright.”

A half-hour later we were tethering our cobs at the already crowded hitching-rail in front of a goodly mansion some mile or more beyond the camp limits on the northward road; a rambling manor house to the full as large as Appleby Hundred, with a shaven lawn in front, and within, lights and music and sounds of revelry.

“By the Lord Harry! but this Master Harndon would seem to be a man of substance,” says Dick.  And then:  “Can you pick out a good horse in the dark, Jack?  It may come to a race for our necks, by and by, and these cobs of ours are too broad-backed for speed.”

I said I could, and so we went deeper into the cavalcade at the hitch-rail and marked out two clean-limbed chargers, a gray and a sorrel; this before we gave the final touches to our plan of action and passed up the broad avenue to the manor house.

XLVI

HOW OUR PIECE MISSED FIRE AT HARNDON ACRES

For a doorkeeper some one or another of the officer guests had set a sergeant on guard; but though the night was yet young the man passed us into the great entrance hall with a hiccough and a wink that spoke thus early of an open house and freely flowing good cheer.

As we had hoped to find it, this rout at Master Harndon’s was a stifling jam, and a good half of the guests were in civilian plain clothes, neither Paris nor London having as yet reached so far into the Carolina plantations to proscribe homespun and to prescribe the gay toggeries of the courts.  This for the men, I hasten to add; for then, as now, our American dames and maids would put a year’s cropping of a plantation on their backs, thinking nothing of it; and there was no lack of shimmering silks and stiff brocades, of high-piled coiffures, paint, patches and powder at this merrymaking at Harndon Acres.