The house of entertainment, as it appeared, was on the opposite side of the open space from the one which Arnold had visited in the forenoon. It was a mansion, as mansions go in the North, with a narrow lawn, clipped hedges and box-borderings, and it was well illuminated in our honor. I thought we should be early; at that hour our Virginia dames and damsels would be just waking from their beauty naps. But there was music within, and the dancing had begun, though guests were still arriving in pairs and groups. Some half-dozen or more reached the door of welcome just as we did, and here I hoped to get the chance of speaking the necessary word to John Champe. But though I was sure he had followed us through the gate, he was nowhere to be seen; and when Arnold’s name was called out by the footman in waiting, my own was coupled with it, and again the chance vanished. Our entry was into a large and brilliantly lighted hall, which was well filled at the moment with the arriving guests; bewigged civilians carrying the solid Dutch pomp bequeathed to their successors by the New Netherlanders; high-bred dames with powdered hair and patches, which, however much they pique the charms of the younger women are, to my mind, a blemish on the face of maturity; officers and their ladies, not so many of the gentlemen wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans as I had expected to see, yet still a fair sprinkling of them. I missed the name of my hostess, though I afterward learned that it was the roof of Chief Justice Smith, brother of the Joshua Pett Smith who had been the aider and abetter of the Arnold treason from the beginning, that sheltered us. But this and kindred trivialities were but the first few drops before the storm which was presently to make me forget them. I was still saying empty nothings to an elderly lady to whom I had been passed on, with my brain busy, as it had been for a good half-hour, upon the Champe blunder, when I began to have a growing sense of impending disaster. It was as if I had groped my way into a dark room, believing it to be empty, and had suddenly been warned, by that sixth sense which is yet unnamed in the books, of the presence of another and vaguely threatening occupant. It is curious how the instinct of self-preservation bobs first to the surface, like a submerged bottle-cork, in an emergency. The impulse was to duck and run, without waiting to see what menaced me, and following it, I bowed and made way for a snuffy old gentleman who was ready to take my entertainer off my hands. But being no better than a blind man in a strange house, I went straight into the thick of the peril. The ballroom lay beyond the broad stair running by easy stages from the upper story, and my thought was to go into the great room and so to lose myself in the throng.