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 had found out a good
part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.

"I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school," he wrote.
"There is a young girl there I take an interest in. She is handsome
and interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a thing has
possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued. Why can't you
make her acquaintance and be civil to her? A country girl, but fine old
stock, and will make a figure some time or other, I tell you. Myrtle
Hazard,--that's her name. A mere schoolgirl. Don't be malicious and
badger me about her, but be polite to her.