ratively comfortable with regard to each other,
each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins's remark about her
friend to such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not
at all comfortable with reference to Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently
considered by the leading "swell" of their circle as the most noticeable
personage of the assembly. The individual exception in each case did
very well as a matter of politeness, but they knew well enough what he
meant.

It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet on
her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth. It was as if it had
just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and
tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked
to her as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the
water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river,
and strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length
afloat upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first
time found her destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule
with gentle sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,--to enchant with
the commonest exercise of speech, through the rare quality of a voice
which could not help being always gracious and winning, of a manner
which came to her as an inheritance of which she had just found the
title. She read in the eyes of all that she was more than any other the
centre of admiration. Blame her who may, the world was a very splendid
vision as it opened before her eyes in its long vista of pleasures and
of triumphs. How different the light of these bright saloons from the
glimmer of the dim chamber at The Poplars! Silence Withers was at that
very moment looking at the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith
Pride. "The old picture seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she
was thinking. But when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to
her that the picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile
upon its lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered
it. A reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the
martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that the
beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company with
which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing herself
with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her news from the
Satanic prov