A return of the natural instincts of girlhood with returning health?
Perhaps so.

An impression produced by her dream?
An effect of an influx from another sphere of being?
The working of Master Byles Gridley's emphatic warning?
The magic of her new talisman?
We may safely leave these questions for the present.

As we have to tell, not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should have done it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it would be to lay bare all the springs of her action.

Until this period, she had hardly thought of herself as a born beauty.

The flatteries she had received from time to time were like the chips and splinters under the green wood, when the chill women pretended to make a fire in the best parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly warming, much less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.
Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet.