recesses which received them. But
in her new-born passion of search, she held her light so as to illuminate
all these deeper spaces. At once she thought she saw the marks of
pressure with a finger. She pressed her own finger on this place, and,
as it yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster sprang
forward, revealing its well-kept secret that it was the mask of a tall,
deep, very narrow drawer. There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle
turned it over, a golden bracelet fell into her hand. She recognized it
at once as that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman
whose portrait hung in her chamber. She clasped it upon her wrist, and
from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely
phantom who had been with her in her dream.

"The old man walked last night, God save us!" said Kitty Fagan to Biddy
Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious discovery.

CHAPTER XVI.

VICTORY.

It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an
unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination
tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who
goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her
fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles
Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the
grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the "properties" with
which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.

The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so
easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the
hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist. She
felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a saint. A
young girl's caprice? Possibly. A return of the natural instincts of
girlhood with returning health? Perhaps so. An impression produced by
her dream? An effect of an influx from another sphere of being? The
working of Master Byles Gridley's emphatic warning? The magic of her new
talisman?

We may safely leave these questions for the present. As we have to tell,
not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should have done
it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it would be to
lay bare all the springs of her action. Until this period, she had
hardly thought of herself as a born beauty. The flatteries she had
received from time