time found her destiny. It was to please, and so to command,--to rule
with gentle sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,--to enchant with
the commonest exercise of speech, through the rare quality of a voice
which could not help being always gracious and winning, of a manner
which came to her as an inheritance of which she had just found the
title. She read in the eyes of all that she was more than any other the
centre of admiration. Blame her who may, the world was a very splendid
vision as it opened before her eyes in its long vista of pleasures and
of triumphs. How different the light of these bright saloons from the
glimmer of the dim chamber at The Poplars! Silence Withers was at that
very moment looking at the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith
Pride. "The old picture seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she
was thinking. But when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to
her that the picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile
upon its lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it.
A reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the
martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that the
beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company with
which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing herself
with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her news from the
Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so long indulged in the
profligacy of _embonpoint_ and loveliness.

The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some _tableaux_.
The girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look "stunning" or
"gorgeous" or "jolly," or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas,
was not far out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing heads
that she would make a fine appearance in that character, that the
"Rescue of Captain John Smith" was specially got up to show her off.

Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of Indian
blood in her veins. It was one of those family legends which some of the
members are a little proud of, and others are willing to leave
uninvestigated. But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she felt
perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals, and she
had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague recollections
which must have come from the old warriors and hunters and their dusky
brides. The Indians who visited