ssion he meant to make
would at length evolve itself logically, and hold by a natural connection
to the first agreeable train of thought which he had called up. Not the
way, certainly, that most young men would arrange their great trial
scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a lawyer in love as much as in business,
and considered himself as pleading a cause before a jury of Myrtle
Hazard's conflicting motives. What would any lawyer do in a jury case
but begin by giving the twelve honest men and true to understand, in the
first place, that their intelligence and virtue were conceded by all, and
that he himself had perfect confidence in them, and leave them to shape
their verdict in accordance with these propositions and his own side of
the case?

Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the honeyed
accents of the young pleader. He flattered her with so much tact, that
she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips of an
admiration which he only shared with all around him. But in him he made
it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very real. This it
evidently was which had led him to trust her with his ambitions and his
plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never keep them from her,
and she was the one woman in the world to whom he thought he could safely
give his confidence.

The dread moment was close at hand. Myrtle was listening with an
instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and
grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it all
in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the sturdy
savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down the primeval
great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his hole in the rock, or
into the tree where he had made his nest. Why should not the coming
question announce itself by stirring in the pulses and thrilling in the
nerves of the descendant of all these grandmothers?

She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind
elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallion.
Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a
girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William
Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors tingling through them,
as he came nearer and nearer the few simple words with which he was to
make Myrtle Hazard the mistress of his destiny. His tones were bec