mighty wind and a fierce death. He would dismount, and sit beside that
Highland gentleman, Jacobite and strong man, and their moods would chime
as they had chimed before. Then on to the house and to the eastern window!
Not to-night, but to-morrow night, perhaps, would the darkness be pierced
by the calm pale star that marked another window. It was all a mistake,
that month at Westover,--days lost and wasted, the running of golden sands
ill to spare from Love's brief glass....

His mood had changed when, with the gathering dusk, he entered his room at
Marot's ordinary. He would go to the Palace that night; it would be the
act of a boy to fling away through the darkness, shirking a duty his
position demanded. He would go and be merry, watching Evelyn in the gown
that Peterborough 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,