“She acts as—­if she might be.  You know he’s broke with Susan Posey, and there’s nothing to hinder.  If you ask my opinion, I think it’s your last chance:  she is n’t a girl to half do things, and if she has taken to this man it will be hard to make her change her mind.  But she’s young, and she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it well there’s no telling.”

Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that evening.  Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide open, carried them.

Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling.  He had laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the certainty of their securing their end.  These papers were to have been taken from the envelope, and found in the garret just at the right moment, either by Cynthia herself or one of the other members of the family, who was to be led on, as it were accidentally, to the discovery.  The right moment must be close at hand.  He was to offer his hand—­and heart, of course—­to Myrtle, and it was to be accepted.  As soon as the decision of the land case was made known, or not long afterwards, there was to be a search in the garret for papers, and these were to be discovered in a certain dusty recess, where, of course, they would have been placed by Miss Cynthia.

And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements seemed like to fail.  This obscure youth—­this poor fool, who had been on the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a boyish promise—­was coming between him and the object of his long pursuit,—­the woman who had every attraction to draw him to herself.  It had been a matter of pride with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost his temper so as to interfere with the precise course of action which his cool judgment approved; but now he was almost beside himself with passion.  His labors, as he believed, had secured the favorable issue of the great case so long pending.  He had followed Myrtle through her whole career, if not as her avowed lover, at least as one whose friendship promised to flower in love in due season.  The moment had come when the scene and the characters in this village drama were to undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as is seen in those fairy spectacles where the dark background changes to a golden palace and the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal splendor.  The change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he had thought himself, found his wand broken, and his power given to another.

He could not sleep during that night.  He paced his room, a prey to jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him from feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour.  He thought of all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own intolerable anguish.  Of revenge.  If Myrtle rejected his suit, should he take her life on the spot, that she might never be another’s,—­that