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 province overhead, where she herself had so long indulged in the profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.

The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux.  The girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look “stunning” or “gorgeous” or “jolly,” or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas, was not far out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing heads that she would make a fine appearance in that character, that the “Rescue of Captain John Smith” was specially got up to show her off.

Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of Indian blood in her veins.  It was one of those family legends which some of the members are a little proud of, and others are willing to leave uninvestigated.  But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she felt perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals, and she had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague recollections which must have come from the old warriors