For the tableaux and fancy-dress ball had been so relished by the more juvenile element of New Helvetia that the successor of that festivity was already projected. This was to be a grotesquerie in calico costumes and masks, chiefly of facetious characters. The masks were deemed essential by the small designers of the entertainment, since the secret of the various disguises had not been carefully kept, and these vizards were ingenuously relied on to protect the incognito of certain personages garbed, with the aid of sympathetic elders, as Dolly Varden, Tilly Slowboy (with a rag-doll baby furnished with a head proof against banging on door-frames or elbows), Sir John Falstaff, three feet high, Robinson Crusoe, and similar celebrities. The whole affair was esteemed a tedious superfluity by the youths of twenty and a few years upward, already a trifle blasé, who sometimes lingered and talked and smoked in the bowling-alley after the game was finished and the ladies had gone. It was from overhearing this chat that Royce learned that although the majority of the young fellows, tired with one effort of devising costumes, had declined to go in calico and in character, still, in deference to the style of the entertainment and the importunity of the children who had projected it, they had agreed to attend in mask. Their out-of-door attire of knickerbockers and flannel shirts and blazers ought to be deemed, they thought, shabby enough to appease the “tacky” requirements of the juvenile managers, who were pleased to call their burlesque masquerade a “tacky party.” Then it was that Royce realized his opportunity. The knickerbockers and flannel shirt, the red-and-black blazer and russet shoes, in which he had entered Etowah Cove, now stowed away in the roof-room of Tubal Cain Sims’s house, were not more the worse for wear than much of such attire at New Helvetia Springs after a few weeks of mountain rambles. Ten minutes in the barbershop of the hotel, at a late hour when it would be deserted by its ordinary patrons, would put him in trim for the occasion, and doubtless its functionaries who had never seen him would fancy him in this dress a newly arrived guest of the hotel or of some of the New Helvetia summer cottagers. He had even a prevision of the free and casual gesture with which he would hand an attendant a quarter of a dollar and send across the road to the store for a mask. And then--and then--he could feel already the rhythm of the waltz music beating in every pulse; he breathed even now the breeze quickening in the motion of the dance, endowed with the sweetness of the zephyrs of the seventh heaven. It was she--she alone--whom he would care to approach; the rest, they were as naught! One touch of her hand, the rapture of one waltz, and he would be ready to throw himself over the bluff; for he would have attained the uttermost happiness that earth could bestow upon him now.