Ned, after parting from the ladies, would walk his long mile home by the solitary echoing road. He needed loneliness; he needed the illimitable graciousness of the open world. Within those shining walls, it seemed to him, he had not been able to think collectedly. Whither was he hurrying, and in what perplexity of mission? At one moment exalted, at another depressed, he could have thought himself the waif of a destiny in which his reason had no voice. He looked up at the sky through an overhead tracery of leaves. The blown branches of trees made a tinsel glitter of the brilliant moon. Some roadside aspens pattered with phantom rain. A sense of unreality stole into his mind, half drugging it. The sound of his footsteps was echoed back from a wall he passed. The echo appeared to double and redouble upon itself; the footsteps to come thicker, thronging fast and ever faster, till he fancied an army of shadows must be going by on the opposite side of the way. His brain grew full of the whisper and rustle of their march. The spectral noise became accented by the far clang of voices--the shout across half a world of some vast human force struggling upon a tide of agony. The long wall ended. He pulled himself together and shook out the ghost of a laugh. Whither? he thought again, as he strode on. To the goal to which his every desire seemed to be compelling him? But he had no will in the matter. That had been sapped--snapped--deposed in a moment. He was nothing but a log, the stump of a mast, in the surf--now rolled upon the shore, now dragged back and committed to fresh voyagings. His erect philosophy, that had helped him so long over multitudinous waters, was become nothing but a broken wastrel of the sea for Fate to play at pitch-and-toss with. Should he ever again be in the position to recover and splice it, to set sail and escape from the fog and welter of the spindrift in which he now tumbled? As he reached his gates, he looked up once more at the sky. The moon waded through a stream of cloud. “She will sink,” he muttered. “Her glitter is already half quenched. Am I in love, or only sickening for a scarlet fever?” CHAPTER IV. Pretty early on the morning after the ball Ned rode over to pay his respects to, and inquire after the health of, the ladies. None, apparently, was as yet in evidence; but Mr Sheridan, having information of his coming, sent down a message inviting him up to his bedroom; and thither the young gentleman bent his steps, not loath to avail himself of any excuse for remaining. He found the _viveur_ of the previous night propped up on his pillows, a towel round his shaven head, a pencil and paper on the counterpane before him. At the dressing-table stood a little common man, in a scratch wig and with a very blue chin, who mixed some powders with small-beer in a tumbler. “You won’t thank me for introducing you,” said Sheridan to Ned. “Monsieur has not _le haut rang_ (spare thy concern), nor any word of our tongue.”