plead with her to yield to their influence,
and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each would have
led her her own way,--whither she knew not. It was the strife of her
"Vision," only in another form,--the contest of two lives her blood
inherited for the mastery of her soul. The might of beauty conquered.
Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely phantom, which
seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished fire of life, and so like
herself as she would grow to be when noon should have ripened her into
maturity.

Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes,
which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness. Then
came a confused sense of eager search for something that she knew was
hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a floor,
or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten
drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there
was something which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be
her talisman. She was in the midst of this eager search when she awoke.

The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her fears
she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what meaning
there was in this frightfully real dream. Her courage came back as her
senses assured her that all around her was natural, as when she left it.
She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint her nightmare had
given her.

In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and large
drawers below. "That desk is yours, Myrtle," her uncle Malachi had once
said to her; "and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay you
to study." Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about the mystery of
the old desk. All the little drawers, of which there were a considerable
number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had
carefully examined. She determined to make one more trial. It was the
dead of the night, and this was a fearful old place to be wandering
about; but she was possessed with an urgent feeling which would not let
her wait until daylight.

She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided along the narrow
entries as she had seemed to move in her dream. She opened the folding
doors of the great upright desk. She