of explanation, apology, appeal, or even terror from his wife would check his rage and weaken his purpose.  His perfect knowledge of the house and the security of its inmates would enable him from some obscure landing or gallery to participate in any secret conclave they might hold in the patio—­the only place suitable for so numerous a rendezvous.  The absence of light in the few external windows pointed to this central gathering.  And he had already conceived his plan of entrance.

Gaining the rear wall of the casa he began cautiously to skirt its brambly base until he had reached a long, oven-like window half obliterated by a monstrous passion vine.  It was the window of what had once been Mrs. Peyton’s boudoir; the window by which he had once forced an entrance to the house when it was in the hands of squatters, the window from which Susy had signaled her Spanish lover, the window whose grating had broken the neck of Judge Peyton’s presumed assassin.  But these recollections no longer delayed him; the moment for action had arrived.  He knew that since the tragedy the boudoir had been dismantled and shunned; the servants believed it to be haunted by the assassin’s ghost.  With the aid of the passion vine the ingress was easy; the interior window was open; the rustle of dead leaves on the bare floor as he entered, and the whir of a frightened bird by his ear, told the story of its desolation and the source of the strange noises that had been heard there.  The door leading to the corridor was lightly bolted, merely to keep it from rattling in the wind.  Slipping the bolt with the blade of his pocket-knife he peered into the dark passage.  The light streaming under a door to the left, and the sound of voices, convinced him that his conjecture was right, and the meeting was gathered on the broad balconies around the patio.  He knew that a narrow gallery, faced with Venetian blinds to exclude the sun, looked down upon them.  He managed to gain it without discovery; luckily the blinds were still down; between their slats, himself invisible, he could hear and see everything that occurred.

Yet even at this supreme moment the first thing that struck him was the almost ludicrous contrast between the appearance of the meeting and its tremendous object.  Whether he was influenced by any previous boyish conception of a clouded and gloomy conspiracy he did not know, but he was for an instant almost disconcerted by the apparent levity and festivity of the conclave.  Decanters and glasses stood on small tables before them; nearly all were drinking and smoking.  They comprised fifteen or twenty men, some of whose faces were familiar to him elsewhere as Southern politicians; a few, he was shocked to see, were well-known Northern Democrats.  Occupying a characteristically central position was the famous Colonel Starbottle, of Virginia.  Jaunty and youthful-looking in his mask-like, beardless face, expansive and dignified in his middle-aged port