seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as in themselves a kind of offence against propriety,) the forlorn woman folded her thin hands and looked on hopelessly, hardly venturing a remonstrance for fear of some new explosion.  As for Cynthia, she was comparatively easy since she had, through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the minister’s questionable arrangement of religious intimacy.  She had, in fact, in a quiet way, given Mr. Bradshaw to understand that he would probably meet Myrtle at the Parsonage if he dropped in at their small gathering.  Clement walked over to Mrs. Hopkins’s after his dinner with the young lawyer, and asked if Susan was ready to go with him.  At the sound of his voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his forehead, and called himself, in subdued tones, a miserable being.  His imagination wavered uncertain for a while between pictures of various modes of ridding himself of existence, and fearful deeds involving the life of others.  He had no fell purpose of actually doing either, but there was a gloomy pleasure in contemplating them as possibilities, and in mentally sketching the “Lines written in Despair” which would be found in what was but an hour before the pocket of the youthful bard, G. H., victim of a hopeless passion.  All this emotion was in the nature of a surprise to the young man.  He had fully believed himself desperately in love with Myrtle Hazard; and it was not until Clement came into the family circle with the right of eminent domain over the realm of Susan’s affections, that this unfortunate discovered that Susan’s pretty ways and morning dress and love of poetry and liking for his company had been too much for him, and that he was henceforth to be wretched during the remainder of his natural life, except so far as he could unburden himself in song.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon Myrtle to the little party at the Eveleths.  Myrtle was not insensible to the attractions of the young lawyer, though she had never thought of herself except as a child in her relations with any of these older persons.  But she was not the same girl that she had been but a few months before.  She had achieved her independence by her audacious and most dangerous enterprise.  She had gone through strange nervous trials and spiritual experiences which had matured her more rapidly than years of common life would have done.  She had got back her health, bringing with it a riper wealth of womanhood.  She had found her destiny in the consciousness that she inherited the beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping for a generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the light again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden time in her own history.