working of emotions in persons of various
temperaments knows well enough that they have periods of incubation,
which differ with the individual, and with the particular cause and
degree of excitement, yet evidently go through a strictly self-limited
series of evolutions, at the end of which, their result--an act of
violence, a paroxysm of tears, a gradual subsidence into repose, or
whatever it may be--declares itself, like the last stage of an attack of
fever and ague. No one can observe children without noticing that there
is a personal equation, to use the astronomer's language, in their
tempers, so that one sulks an hour over an offence which makes another a
fury for five minutes, and leaves him or her an angel when it is over.

At the end of three days, Elsie braided her long, glossy, black hair, and
shot a golden arrow through it. She dressed herself with more than usual
care, and came down in the morning superb in her stormy beauty. The
brooding paroxysm was over, or at least her passion had changed its
phase. Her father saw it with great relief; he had always many fears for
her in her hours and days of gloom, but, for reasons before assigned, had
felt that she must be trusted to herself, without appealing to actual
restraint, or any other supervision than such as Old Sophy could exercise
without offence.

She went off at the accustomed hour to the school. All the girls had
their eyes on her. None so keen as these young misses to know an inward
movement by an outward sign of adornment: if they have not as many
signals as the ships that sail the great seas, there is not an end of
ribbon or a turn of a ringlet which is not a hieroglyphic with a hidden
meaning to these little cruisers over the ocean of sentiment.

The girls all looked at Elsie with a new thought; for she was more
sumptuously arrayed than perhaps ever before at the school; and they said
to themselves that she had come meaning to draw the young master's eyes
upon her. That was it; what else could it be? The beautiful cold girl
with the diamond eyes meant to dazzle the handsome young gentleman. He
would be afraid to love her; it couldn't be true, that which some people
had said in the village; she was n't the kind of young lady to make Mr.
Langdon happy. Those dark people are never safe: so one of the young
blondes said to herself. Elsie was not literary enough for such a
scholar: so thought Miss Charlotte Ann Wood, the young poetess. She