"and see this gentleman out of the house."

An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside the
table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The overseer
had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by a message
from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business; the negro
women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the noises from the
quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still. In his rich,
figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward sat and drank his
wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying and the filling of the
slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was open, and the wind blowing in
made the candles to flicker. With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the
wash of the river,--stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the
lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the
gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity:
a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred
and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned
him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed
them, and would have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the
walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the
creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and
began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The
past had its ghosts,--not many; what spectres the future might raise only
itself could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored
future; but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of
loneliness that was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness
without, of lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of
roses that one thought.

Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat