ALBANY – In a sign that Governor Pataki is close to making public his decision on whether to run for a fourth term next year, more than two-dozen of Mr. Pataki’s closest current and former advisers converged on the Executive Mansion here late yesterday for a private meeting that lasted well into the evening, sources said.

The three-term Republican governor has bedeviled political observers and even members of his own party over the past half-year by sending mixed signals about his political plans, indicating as recently as yesterday that he has made a decision, but stubbornly refusing to offer even a fixed timetable on when he will make the decision public.

As word of the meeting spread through Albany last evening, speculation increased that the governor will announce today that he is not planning to seek a record fourth, four-year term.

Mr. Pataki, who has openly admitted he is considering a long-shot run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, two weeks ago told a New York Times reporter prior to an Iowa trip that was aimed at testing the waters for a national race, that he would make a decision on the governor’s race by the end of September. Yet the governor backed away from that statement yesterday, telling Capitol reporters he will make his announcement “sooner than that.” The accelerated timetable follows increasing complaints from party officials that Mr. Pataki has already waited too long to announce his plans and endangered their chances of raising funds for a replacement.

Sources told The New York Sun later in the day that Mr. Pataki invited advisers from 1994 to the present to the mansion in anticipation of an announcement today. It could not be determined whether the governor plans to announce he will challenge next year’s presumptive Democratic nominee, the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer; decline another run, resign from office, or something else.

Mr. Pataki is known for sending signals that he plans to make an important announcement, then delivering something bland. A longtime observer of Mr. Pataki’s warned yesterday the meeting at the mansion could be a smokescreen: “I’ve watched the man for over 12 years,” the source said. “He plays these games. He likes to send signals out just to see what happens.”

According to the same source, Mr. Pataki plans a morning conference call today with all 62 Republican County chairs followed by a Cabinet-level staff meeting and an evening meeting tonight at the Water Club in Manhattan. Several recent independent polls have shown Mr. Pataki trailing Mr. Spitzer by double digits in a hypothetical race next year.