He had meant to lie at Brampton, and had been advised at the tavern of a short cut, a moorland bridle-path.

Who had told him of it?
The landlord, he thought, or the merry fellow in brown who had stood brandy to the company?
Anyhow, it was to save him five miles, and that was something in this accursed weather.

The path was clear--he could see it squelching below him, pale in the last wet daylight--but where the devil did it lead?
Into the heart of a moss, it seemed, and yet Brampton lay out of the moors in the tilled valley.
At first the fumes in his head raised him above the uncertainty of his road and the eternal downpour.

His mind was far away in a select world of his own imagining.

He saw himself in a privy chamber, to which he had been conducted by reverent lackeys, the door closed, the lamp lit, and the Duke's masterful eyes bright with expectation.