“Put the wreath on her for the next tableau,” some of them whispered, just as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened to place it upon her head.

The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and trampled it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was rising.  With a cry which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an Indian’s battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her arm against the girl who had thus rudely assailed her.  The girl sank to the ground, covering her eyes in her terror.  Myrtle, with her arm still lifted, and the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her, rigid as if she had been suddenly changed to stone.  Many of those looking on thought all this was a part of the show, and were thrilled with the wonderful acting.  Before those immediately around her had had time to recover from the palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung the knife away from her, and was kneeling, her head bowed and her hands crossed upon her breast.  The audience went into a rapture of applause as the curtain came suddenly down; but Myrtle had forgotten all but the dread peril she had just passed, and was thanking God that his angel—­her own protecting spirit, as it seemed to her had stayed the arm which a passion such as her nature had never known, such as she believed was alien to her truest self, had lifted with deadliest purpose.  She alone knew how extreme the danger had been.  “She meant to scare her,—­that ’s all,” they said.  But Myrtle tore the eagle’s feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored beads, and threw off her painted robe.  The metempsychosis was far too real for her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of which her soul recoiled in horror.

“Pocahontas has got a horrid headache,” the managing young ladies gave it out, “and can’t come to time for the last tableau.”  So this all passed over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with no small addition to her local fame,—­for it must have been acting; “and was n’t it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if she was going to stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?”

As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact with those who were least agreeable to meet.  The low-bred youth who amuse themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls who try to show off their gentility to those whom they think less important than themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but they make themselves odiously prominent before the quiet and modest young people have had time to gain the new scholar’s confidence.  Myrtle found friends in due time, some of them daughters of rich people, some poor girls, who came with the same sincerity of purpose as herself.  But not one was her match in the facility of acquiring knowledge.  Not one promised to make such a mark in society, if she found an opening into its loftier circles.  She was by no means ignorant of her natural gifts, and she cultivated them with the ambition which would not let her rest.