Presently she found herself in a half-lighted apartment, where there were books on the shelves around, and a desk with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with a worn bit of carpet before it.

And while she looked, a great serpent writhed in through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the room, laying one huge ring all round it, and then, going round again, laid another ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all round the room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in the centre; and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air, and bring his head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features were not those of a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she had read that very day in a little note which said, "Come to my study to-morrow, and we will read hymns together." Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and the two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in their own.
Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to their influence, and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each would have led her her own way,--whither she knew not.

It was the strife of her "Vision," only in another form,--the contest of two lives her blood inherited for the mastery of her soul.

The might of beauty conquered.
Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely phantom, which seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished fire of life, and so like herself as she would grow to be when noon should have ripened her into maturity.
Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes, which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness.

Then came a confused sense of eager search for something that she knew was hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a floor, or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there was something which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be her talisman.