ey wore the most becoming ribbon she had displayed for a long time,
and Gifted was so taken with her pretty looks that he might very
probably have made the same speech to her that he had been on the point
of making to Myrtle the day before, but that he remembered her plighted
affections, and thought what he should have to say for himself when
Clement Lindsay, in a frenzy of rage and jealousy, stood before him,
probably armed with as many deadly instruments as a lawyer mentions by
name in an indictment for murder.

Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations Myrtle
was making of her tastes and inclinations. He had always felt dazzled,
as well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in her
expression and manner which made him feel still more strongly that they
were intended for different spheres of life. He could not but own that
she was born for a brilliant destiny,--that no ball-room would throw a
light from its chandeliers too strong for her,--that no circle would be
too brilliant for her to illuminate by her presence. Love does not
thrive without hope, and Cyprian was beginning to see that it was idle
in him to think of folding these wide wings of Myrtle's so that they
would be shut up in any cage he could ever offer her. He began to doubt
whether, after all, he might not find a meeker and humbler nature better
adapted to his own. And so it happened that one evening after the three
girls, Olive, Myrtle, and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage,
and Cyprian, availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them,
he found he had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl
whose voice had grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in the
sick-chamber, that it seemed to him more like music than speech. It
would not be fair to say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian was
devoting himself to Bathsheba. Her ambition was already reaching beyond
her little village circle, and she had an inward sense that Cyprian
found a form of sympathy in the minister's simple-minded daughter which
he could not ask from a young woman of her own aspirations.

Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one morning
surprised by an early call from Myrtle. He had a volume of Walton's
Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the original, when she
entered.

"Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?" he
exclaimed. "I might call you _Kere