borrow an old image—­moonlight is no more than a cold and vacant glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming orb of day.  If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered, well-balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn her existence,—­how she could direct and chasten and elevate the character of all his thoughts and actions!

“Bathsheba,” said Olive, “it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more and more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard.  He has never got over the fancy he took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and called her the fire-hang-bird.  Wouldn’t they suit each other by and by, after Myrtle has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and noble woman, as I feel sure she will in due time?”

“Myrtle is very lovely,” Bathsheba answered, “but is n’t she a little too—­flighty—­for one like your brother?  Cyprian isn’t more like other young men than Myrtle is like other young girls.  I have thought sometimes—­I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and common ones do not get along best together.  Does n’t Cyprian want some more every-day kind of girl to keep him straight?  Myrtle is beautiful, beautiful,—­fascinates everybody.  Has Mr. Bradshaw been following after her lately?  He is taken with her too.  Didn’t you ever think she would have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last?  He looks to me like a man that would hold on desperately as a lover.”

If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl, hardly sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or nineteen, it would have been plain sailing enough for Murray Bradshaw.  But he knew what a distance their ages seemed just now to put between them,—­a distance which would grow practically less and less with every year, and he did not wish to risk anything so long as there was no danger of interference.  He rather encouraged Gifted Hopkins to write poetry to Myrtle.  “Go in, Gifted,” he said, “there’s no telling what may come of it,” and Gifted did go in at a great rate.

Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of Gifted Hopkins’s last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.