he war-whoop, and went at her with a knife.
Festive,--hey? Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as if she meant
to stick her, anyhow. Splendid style. Why can't you go over to the shop
and make 'em trot her out?"

The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would, just
as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had nothing
in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon. Myrtle in the mean
time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an extraordinary
honor was awaiting her.

That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
leisure morning, did at last occur. An elegant carriage, with a coachman
in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and wearing a
hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal of Madam
Delacoste's establishment. A card was sent in bearing the open sesame
of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place. Miss Myrtle
Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the fashionable woman and
the young girl sat half an hour together in lively conversation.

Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful
to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as artistically
composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind of various
rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray that nodded on her
bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her sandal. As for the lady, she
was captivated with Myrtle. There is nothing that your fashionable
woman, who has ground and polished her own spark of life into as many and
as glittering social facets as it will bear, has a greater passion for
than a large rough diamond, which knows nothing of the sea of light it
imprisons, and which it will be her pride to have cut into a brilliant
under her own eye, and to show the world for its admiration and her own
reflected glory. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire inventory of
Myrtle's natural endowments before the interview was over. She had no
marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait Myrtle
would be at one of her stylish parties.

She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all
which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she ha