eterborough 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"--

It was a night that was thronged with stars, and visited by a whispering
wind. Haward, walking rapidly along the almost deserted Nicholson Street,
lifted his burning forehead to the cool air and the star-strewn fields of
heaven. Coming to the gate by which he had entered the afternoon before,
he raised the latch and passed into the garden. By now his fever was full
upon him, and it was a man scarce to be held responsible for his actions
that presently knocked at the door of the long room where, at the window
opening upon Palace Street, Audrey sat with Mistress Stagg and watched the
people going to the ball.

CHAPTER XIX

THE GOVERNOR'S BALL

For an hour it had been very quiet, very peaceful, in the small white
house on Palace Street. Darden was not there; for the Commissary had sent
for him, having certain inquiries to make and a stern warning to deliver.
Mistress Deborah had been asked to spend the night with an acquaintance in
the town, so she also was out and gone. Mistress Stagg and Audrey kept the
lower rooms, while overhead Mr. Charles