exalted ambitions, of burning desire to do great deeds.  Something was calling her—­calling and calling with the compelling note of a far-off yet insistent trumpet, and as she gazed at the mailed hand with the spear rising triumphantly out of the ruby heart, she began to understand.  A feeling of awe crept over her, that she, little Mary Ware, should be hearing the same call that Edryn heard.  Somewhere, some day, some great achievement awaited her.  Now she knew that that was why she had been born into the world.  That was why, too, that Providence had opened a way for her to come to Warwick Hall, that she might learn what was to be “the North-star of her great ambition,” and how “to keep the compass needle of her soul” ever true to it.

Clasping her hands together as reverently and humbly as if she were before an altar, she looked up at the ruby heart, her face all alight, whispering Edryn’s answer: 

“’Tis the King’s call!  O list! 
O heart and hand of mine keep tryst—­
Keep tryst or die!”

The music stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and all a-tingle with the exalted mood in which it left her, she ran up to her room and knelt by the window, looking out into the dusk with eager shining eyes.  As yet it was all vague and shadowy, that mysterious future which awaited her.  With what great duty to the universe she was to keep tryst she did not know; but whatever it was she would do it at any cost.  To callow wings no flight is too high to attempt.  At sixteen all things are possible.

All girls of Mary’s imaginative impulsive temperament have had such moments, under the spell of some unusual inspiration, but their dreams are apt to vanish at contact with the earth again, as suddenly as a bubble breaks when some material object touches it.  But with Mary the vision stayed.  True, it had to retire into the background when dinner was announced, and her over-weening curiosity brought her down to the consideration of common everyday affairs, but she did not lose the sense of having been set apart in some way by that supreme moment on the stair.  To the world she might be only an ordinary little Freshman, but inwardly she knew she was a sort of Joan of Arc, called and consecrated to some high destiny.

She went down to dinner in an uplifted frame of mind that made her passage down the long dining room in the wake of Madam and the few returned teachers a veritable march of triumph.  The feeling that the curtain had gone up on an interesting play in which she was chief actor came back stronger than ever when she took her seat in one of the high-backed ebony chairs, with the carved griffins atop, and unfolded her napkin in the gaze of a long line of ancestral portraits.

Madam Chartley, who had been looking forward to the dinner hour with some apprehension on the new pupil’s account, knowing she would be obliged to curb the lively little tongue if she talked at the table as she had done in the reception room, was amazed at the change in her.  Warwick Hall had done its work.  Already the little chameleon had taken on the colour of her surroundings.  Hawkins, in all his years of London service, had never served a more demure, self-possessed little English maiden, or one who listened with greater deference to the conversation of her elders.