hargers, 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.

Lacking an introducer, and wanting, moreover, nothing save the leave to
have standing-room in the throng as lookers-on, we gave Mr. Marmaduke
Harndon, a sleek, rotund little gentleman, smirking and bowing and
tapping the lid of his silver snuff-box, a wide berth; and with an
agreement to meet later for the comparing of notes, Jennifer and I went
apart at the door of the ball-room, each to lose himself in the
assembled company as an otter slips into a pool, namely, without
ruffling it.

'Twas easily done. Winnsborough had by this time become a refuge camp
for all the loyalists in the region roundabout, and there were many in
the present company who were strangers one to another, uneasy, shifting
figures in the gay throng, beneath the notice alike of haughty dames and
prinking dandy officers. Beneath the notice, I say; yet I would qualify
this, for more than one of the epauletted macaronis trod upon my toes or
bustled me rudely in the crush till I trembled, not for my own
self-control, but for Richard's, making sure that the lad was having no
more gentlemanly welcome than I.

'Twas with some notion of finding ampler room for my feet that I edged
away through the fringing wall-crowd in the dancing-room toward a
curtained archway at the back. As yet I had overheard naught save the
silly persiflage of the belles and beaux--a word here and another
there-