The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York

XIV.
MRS. FRANKLAND AND PHILLIDA.

An hour later, when Phillida and Agatha had just got to a stage in unpacking in which all that one owns is lying in twenty heaps about the room, each several heap seeming larger than the trunk in which it came, there was a ring at the door, and Mr. Millard was announced.

"Oh, dear! I think he might have waited until to-morrow," grumbled Agatha to her mother, after Phillida had gone to the parlor. "He'll stay for hours, I suppose, and I never can get these things put away alone, and we won't get you to bed before midnight. He ought to remember that you're not strong. But it's just like a man in love to come when you're in a mess, and never to go away."

Millard was more thoughtful than another might have been, and in half an hour Phillida returned to the back room, with a softly radiant expression of countenance, bearing a bouquet of flowers which Millard had brought for Mrs. Callender. Phillida at once helped Agatha attack chaos. The floor, the chairs, the table, the bed, and the top of the dressing-case were at length cleared, and preparations were making for getting the tired mother to her rest before ten o'clock.

"Seems to me," said Agatha, "that if I were in Philly's place I'd want something more than a brief call on the first evening, after so long a separation."

"Seems to me," said the mother, mimicking Agatha's tone and turning upon the girl with an amused smile, "if you ever have a lover and are as hard to please with him as you are with Mr. Millard, he might as well give it up before he begins."

In the morning early came Mrs. Frankland. She kissed Phillida on this cheek and on that, embraced her and called her "Dear, dear child," held her off with both hands and looked with admiration at her well-modeled face, freshened with wind and sun. She declared that the mountain air had done Phillida a great deal of good, and inquired how her dear, good mother was.

"Mother is wonderfully better," said Phillida; "I may say, well again."

"What a mercy that is! Now you'll be able to go on with the blessed work you are doing. You have a gift for mission work; that's your vocation. I should make a poor one in your place. It's a talent. As for me, I have a new call."

"A new call—what is that?" said Phillida, rolling up an easy chair for Mrs. Frankland to sit on.

"It's all through you, I suppose. You brought Mrs. Hilbrough to hear me, and Mrs. Hilbrough made me acquainted with Mrs. Van Horne, and she has invited me to give readings in her parlor. I gave the first last Thursday, with great success. The great parlor was full, and many wept like little children."

The words here written are poor beside what Mrs. Frankland said. Her inflection, the outward sweep of her hand when she said "great parlor," brought the rich scene vaguely to Phillida's imagination, and the mellow falling cadence with which she spoke of those who had wept like little children, letting her hands drop limp the while upon her lap, made it all very picturesque and touching. But Phillida twisted the fingers of her left hand with her right, feeling a little wrench in trying to put herself into sympathy with this movement. It was the philanthropic side of religion rather than the propagandist that appealed to her, and she could hardly feel pity for people whose most imaginary wants were supplied.

The quick instinct for detecting and following the sympathy of an audience is half the outfit for an orator; and Mrs. Frankland felt the need of additional statement to carry the matter rightly to Phillida. She was ever feeling about for the electrical button that would reach a hearer's sympathies, and never content until she had touched it.

"I find the burdens of these wealthy women are as great—even greater than those of others. Many of them are tired of the worldliness, and weary of the utter frivolity, of their pursuits." She put a long, rich, vibrant emphasis on the words "utter frivolity." "Don't you think it a good plan to bring them to the rest of the gospel?"

"Certainly," said Phillida, who could not logically gainsay such a statement; but she was convinced rather than touched by any living sympathy with Mrs. Frankland's impulse, and she still twisted the tips of the fingers of her left hand with her right.

"I hope, dear child," Mrs. Frankland went on, in a meditative tone, looking out of the window and steering now upon a home tack—"I hope that I can serve in some way the cause of the poor you have so much at heart. Missions like yours languish for funds. If I could be the means of bringing people of great fortune to consecrate their wealth, it might fill many a thirsty channel of benevolence with refreshing streams." Ah, that one could produce here the tone of her voice as of a brook brimming over barriers, and running melodious to the meadows below!

"That is true," said Phillida, remembering how many betterments might be made in the coffee-room and the reading-room if only one had the money, and remembering how her own beloved Charley had helped the Mission and made the lot of the unhappy Wilhelmina Schulenberg less grievous. "I do think it may prove to be a great work," she added thoughtfully, folding her hands upon her lap in unconscious sign that she had reached a conclusion—a logical equilibrium.

"And I want you to go with me to the readings on Thursday. Mrs. Van Horne knows your aunt, Mrs. Gouverneur, and she will be glad to see you."

Phillida looked down and began to pinch the tips of her fingers again. She shrunk a little from Mrs. Van Horne's set; she thought her dress probably beneath their standard, but with an effort she put away such fears as frivolous, and promised to go.

Thursday afternoon found Phillida sitting by Mrs. Hilbrough in the Van Horne parlor, which was draped with the costly products of distant looms, wrought by the dusky fingers of Orientals inheriting the slowly perfected special skill of generations, and with the fabrics produced by mediæval workmen whose artistic products had gathered value as all their fellows had perished; for other races and other ages have contributed their toil to the magnificence of a New York palace. The great room was spanned by a ceiling on which the creative imaginations of great artists had lavished rare fancies in gold and ivory, while the costliest, if not the noblest, paintings and sculptures of our modern time were all about a parlor whose very chairs and ottomans had been designed by men of genius.

Once the words of Mrs. Frankland were heard with these surroundings, one felt that it would be wrong to attribute to ambitious motives her desire for such an environment. She might rather be said to have been drawn here by an inspiration for artistic harmony. The resonant periods of Bossuet would hardly have echoed through the modern centuries if he had not had the magnificent court of Louis the Great for a sounding-board. When Mrs. Frankland spoke in the Van Horne parlor her auditors felt that the mellifluous voice and stately sentences could not have had a more appropriate setting, and that the splendid apartment could not have been put to a more fitting use. Even the simple religious songs used at the beginning and close of the meetings were accompanied upon a grand piano of finest tone, whose richly inlaid case represented the expenditure of a moderate fortune. Mrs. Van Horne could command the best amateur musical talent, so that the little emotional Moody-and-Sankeys that Mrs. Frankland selected were so overlaid and glorified in the performance as to be almost transformed into works of art.

Phillida looked upon these evidences of lavish expenditure with less bedazzlement than one might have expected in a person of her age. For she had grown up under shelter from the world. While she remained in the antipodes her contact with life outside her own family had been small. In Brooklyn her mother's ill health had kept her much at home, and the dominant influence of her father had therefore every chance to make itself felt upon her character, and that influence was all in favor of a self-denying philanthropy. To the last her father was altruistic, finding nothing worth living for but the doing for others. Abiding secluded as Phillida had, the father's stamp remained uneffaced. She saw in all this magnificence a wanton waste of resources. She put it side by side with her sense of a thousand needs of others, and she felt for it more condemnation than admiration. Mrs. Frankland's vocation to the rich was justified in her mind; it was, after all, a sort of mission to the heathen.

And who shall say that Mrs. Frankland's missionary impulse was not a true one? Phillida's people were exteriorly more miserable; but who knows whether the woes of a Mulberry street tenement are greater than those of a Fifth Avenue palace? Certainly Mrs. Frankland found wounded hearts enough. The woman with an unfaithful husband, the mother of a reckless son who has been obliged to flee the country, the wife of a runaway cashier, disgraced and dependent upon rich relatives—these and a score besides poured into her ear their sorrows, and were comforted by her sympathy cordially expressed, and by her confidence in a consoling divine love and her visions of a future of everlasting rest. Mrs. Frankland had found her proper field—a true mission field indeed, for in this world-out-of-joint there is little danger of going astray in looking for misery of one sort or another. If the sorrows of the poor are greater, they have, if not consolation, at least a fortunate numbness produced by the never-ending battle for bread; but the canker has time to gnaw the very heart out of the rich woman.

Even on the mind of Phillida, as she now listened to Mrs. Frankland, the accessories made a difference. How many dogmas have lived for centuries, not by their reasonableness but by the impressiveness of trappings! Liturgies chanted under lofty arches, creeds recited by generation following generation, traditions of law, however absurd, uttered by one big-wigged judge following a reverend line of ghostly big-wigs gone before that have said the same foolish things for ages—these all take considerable advantage from the power of accessories to impose upon the human imagination. The divinity that hedges kings is the result of a set of stage-fixings which make the little great, and half the horror inspired by the priest's curse is derived from bell and book and candle. The mystery of print gives weight to small men by the same witchcraft; you would not take the personal advice of so stupid a man as Criticus about the crossing of a t, but when he prints a tirade anonymously in the Philadelphia "Tempus" the condemnation becomes serious.

Just in this way the imagination of Phillida was affected by the new surroundings in the midst of which Mrs. Frankland spoke. The old addresses in a Bible-class room with four plastered walls, or a modest parlor, did not seem to have half so much force as these. The weight of a brilliant success was now thrown into the scale, and Mrs. Frankland could speak with an apostolic authority hitherto unknown. The speaker's own imagination felt the influence of her new-found altitude, and she expressed herself with assurance and deliberation, and with more dignity and pathos than ever before.

With all this background, Mrs. Frankland spoke to-day from the twelfth chapter of Romans on personal consecration. But she did not treat the theme as a person of reformatory temperament might have done, by denouncing the frivolity of rich and fashionable lives. It was not in her nature to antagonize an audience. She drew a charming picture of the beauty of a consecrated life, and she embellished it with wonderful instances of devotion, interspersed with touching anecdotes of heroism and self-sacrifice. The impression upon her audience was as remarkable as it was certain to be transient. Women wept at the ravishing vision of a life wholly given to noble ends, and then went their ways to live as before, after the predispositions of their natures, the habits of their lives, and the conventional standards of their class.

But in the heart of Phillida the words of the speaker fell upon fertile soil, and germinated, where there was never a stone or a thorn. The insularity of her life had left her very susceptible to Mrs. Frankland's discourses. Old stagers who have been impressed now by this, now by that, speech, writing, or personal persuasion, have suffered a certain wholesome induration. Phillida was a virginal enthusiast.

XV.
TWO WAYS.

He found a far-awayness in her mood which made him keep back his proposal for a while. He did not admire her the less in her periods of exaltation, but he felt less secure of her when she soared into a region whither he could not follow. He hesitated, and discussed the weather of the whole week past, smiting his knee gently with his gloves in the endeavor to obtain cheerfulness by affecting it. She, on her part, was equally eager to draw Millard into the paths of feeling and action she loved so well, and while he was yet trifling with his gloves and the weather topic, she began:

"Charley, I do wish you could have heard Mrs. Frankland's talk to-day." Phillida's hands were turned palms downward on her lap as she spoke; Millard fancied that their lines expressed the refinement of her organization.

"Why doesn't she admit men?" he said, smiling. "Here you, who don't need any betterment, will become so good by and by that you'll leave me entirely behind. We men need evangelizing more than women do. Why does Mrs. Frankland shut us out from her good influences?"

"Oh! you know she's an Episcopalian, and Episcopalians don't think it right for women to set up to teach men."

"I'm Episcopalian enough, but if a woman sets up as a preacher at all, I don't see why she shouldn't preach to those that need it most. It's only called a 'Bible reading'"—here Charley carefully spread his gloves across his right knee—"there's no law against reading the Bible to men?" he added, looking up with a quick winning smile. "Now you see she turns the scripture topsy-turvy. Instead of women having to inquire of their husbands at home, men are obliged to inquire of their wives and sweethearts. I don't mind that, though. I'd rather hear it from you than from Mrs. Frankland any day." And he gathered up his gloves, and leaned back in his chair.

Phillida smiled, and took this for an invitation to repeat to him part of what Mrs. Frankland had said. She related the story of Elizabeth Fry's work in Newgate, as Mrs. Frankland had told it, she retold Mrs. Frankland's version of Florence Nightingale in the hospital, and then she paused.

"There, Charley," she said deprecatingly, "I can't tell these things with half the splendid effect that Mrs. Frankland did. But it made a great impression on me. I mean to try to be more useful."

"You? I don't see how you can be any better than you are, my dear. That kind of talk is good for other people, but it isn't meant for you."

"Don't say that; please don't. But Mrs. Frankland made a deep impression on all the people at Mrs. Van Horne's."

"At Mrs. Van Horne's?" he asked, with curiosity mingled with surprise.

"Yes; I went with Mrs. Hilbrough."

"Whew! Has Mrs. Frankland got in there?" he said, twirling his cane reflectively. "I hadn't heard it."

"It isn't quite fair for you to say 'got in there,' is it, Charley? Mrs. Frankland was invited by Mrs. Van Horne to give her readings at her house, and she thought it might do good," said Phillida, unwilling to believe that anybody she liked could be more worldly than she was herself.

"I did not mean to speak slightingly of Mrs. Frankland," he said; "I suppose she is a very good woman. But I know she asked Mrs. Hilbrough to let her read in her house. I only guessed that she must have managed Mrs. Van Horne in some way. It is no disgrace for her to seek to give her readings where she thinks they will do good."

"Did she ask Mrs. Hilbrough?" said Phillida.

"Mrs. Hilbrough told me so, and the Van Horne opening may have been one of Mrs. Hilbrough's clever contrivances. That woman is a perfect general. This reading at Mrs. Van Horne's must be a piece of her fine work."

Just why this view of the case should have pained Phillida she could hardly have told. She liked to dwell in a region of high ideals, and she hated the practical necessities that oblige high ideals to humble themselves before they can be incarnated into facts. There could be no harm in Mrs. Frankland's seeking to reach the people she wished to address, but the notion of contrivance and management for the promotion of a mission so lofty made that mission seem a little shop-worn and offended Phillida's love of congruity. Then, too, she felt that to Millard Mrs. Frankland was not so worshipful a figure as to herself, and a painful lack of concord in thought and purpose between her lover and herself was disclosed. The topic was changed, but the two did not get into the same groove of thought during the evening.

Even though a lover, Millard did not lose his characteristic thoughtfulness. Knowing that early rest was important for the mother, and conjecturing that she slept just behind the sliding-doors, Charley did not allow himself to outstay his time. It was only when he had taken his hat to leave that he got courage to ask Phillida if she were engaged for the next afternoon. When she said no, he proposed the theater. Phillida would have refused the invitation an hour before, but in the tenderness of parting she had a remorseful sense of pain regarding the whole interview. With a scrupulousness quite characteristic she had begun to blame herself. To refuse the invitation to the Irving matinée would be to add to an undefined estrangement which both felt but refused to admit, and so, with her mind all in a jumble, she said: "Yes; certainly. I'll go if you would like me to, Charley."

But she lay awake long that night in dissatisfaction with herself. She had gained nothing with Charley, her ideals had been bruised and broken, her visions of future personal excellence were now confused, and she was committed to give valuable time to what seemed to her a sort of dissipation. Would she never be able to emulate Mrs. Fry? Would the lofty aspiration she had cherished prove beyond her reach? And then, once, just once, there intruded the unwelcome thought that her engagement with Millard was possibly a mistake, and that it might defeat the great ends she had in view. The thought was too painful for her; she banished it instantly, upbraiding herself for her disloyalty, and replacing the image of her lover on its pedestal again. Was not Charley the best of men? Had he not been liberal to the Mission and generous to Mina Schulenberg? Then she planned again the work they would be able to accomplish together, she diligent, and he liberal, until thoughts of this sort mingled with her dreams.

She went to see Irving's Shylock. The spectacular street scenes interested her; the boat that sailed so gracefully on the dry land of the stage excited her curiosity; and she felt the beauty and artistic delicacy of the Portia. But she was ill at ease through it all. She was too much in the mood of a moralist to see the play merely as a work of art; she could not keep her mind from reverting to matters having nothing to do with the play, such as the versatility of an actress's domestic relations. And she could not but feel that in so far as the play diverted her, it did so at the expense of that strenuousness of endeavor for extraordinary usefulness which her mind had taken under the spell of Mrs. Frankland's speech.

"Didn't you like it?" said Millard, when they had reached the fresh air of the street and disentangled themselves from the debouching crowd—a noble pair to look upon as they walked thus in the late afternoon.

"Yes," said Phillida, spreading her parasol against the slant beams of the declining sun, which illuminated the red brick walls and touched the lofty cornices and the worn stones of the driveway with high lights, while now this and now that distant window seemed to burn with ruddy fire—"yes; I couldn't help enjoying Miss Terry's Portia. I am no judge, but as a play I think it must have been good."

"Why do you say 'as a play'?" he asked. "What could it be but a play?" He punctuated his question by tapping the pavement with his cane.

Phillida laughed a little at herself, but added with great seriousness: "Would you think worse of me, Charley, if I should tell you that I don't quite like plays?" And she looked up at him in a manner at once affectionate and protesting.

Millard could not help giving her credit for the delicacy she showed in her manner of differing from him.

"No," he said; "I couldn't but think the best of you in any case, Phillida, but you might make me think worse of myself, you know, for I do like plays. And more than that," he said, turning full upon her, "you might succeed in making me think that you thought the worse of me, and that would be the very worst of all."

This was said in a half-playful tone, but to Phillida it opened again the painful vision of a possible drawing apart through a contrariety of tastes. She therefore said no more in that direction, but contented herself with some general criticisms on Irving's Shylock, the incongruities in which she pointed out, and her criticisms, which were tolerably acute, excited Millard's admiration; and it is not to be expected that a lover's admiration should maintain any just proportion to that which calls it forth.

Again the Thursday sermon at Mrs. Van Horne's came around, and again Phillida was restored to a white heat of zeal mingled with a rueful distrust of her own power to hold herself to the continuous pursuit of her ideal. Millard, perceiving that she dreaded to be invited again, refrained from offering to take her to the theater. He waited several weeks, and then ventured, with some hesitation, to ask her to go with him to see one of the Wagner operas. He was frightened at his own boldness in asking, and he kept his eyes upon the ferule of his cane with which he was tapping the toe of his boot, afraid to look up while she answered. She saw how timidly he asked, and her heart was cruelly wounded by the necessity she felt to refuse; but she had fortified herself to resist just such a temptation.

"I'd rather not go, Charley," she said slowly, in accents so pleading and so full of pain that Millard felt remorse that he should have suggested such a thing.

But this traveling on divergent lines could not but have its effect upon them. He was too well-mannered, she was too good, both were too affectionate, for them to quarrel easily. But there took place something that could hardly be called estrangement; it was rather what a Frenchman might, with a refinement not possible in our idiom, call an éloignement. In spite of their exertions to come together, they drew apart. This process was interrupted by seasons of renewed tenderness. But Phillida's zeal, favored by Mrs. Frankland's meetings, held her back from those pursuits into which Millard would have drawn her, and only a general interest in her altruistic aims was possible to him. Again and again he made some exertion to enter into her pursuits, but he could never get any farther than he could go by the aid of his check-book. Once or twice she went with him to some public entertainment, but those social pursuits to which he was habituated she avoided as dissipations. Thus they loved each other, but it is pitiful to love as they did, while unable to conceal from themselves that a gulf lay between the main tastes and pursuits of the one and the other.

XVI.
A SÉANCE AT MRS. VAN HORNE'S.

A certain sort of combativeness she had, but it was combativeness with the edge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as consecration. But as her acquaintance with people of wealth extended she found that even they, conservative by very force of abundance, were affected by the unbelieving spirit of a critical age. The very prosperous are partly under shelter from the prevailing intellectual currents of their time. Those whose attention is engrossed by things are in so far shut out from the appeal of ideas. But thought is very penetrating; it will reach by conduction what it can not attain by radiation. An intellectual movement touches the highest and the lowest with difficulty, but it does at length affect in a measure even those whose minds are narcotized by abundance as well as those whose brains are fagged by too much toil and care. When Mrs. Frankland became aware that there was unbelief, latent and developed, among her hearers, the prow of her oratory veered around, and faith became now, as consecration had been before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she proceeded to exalt belief itself into the most meritorious of acts. This sort of paradox is common to all popular religious teachers.

Mrs. Frankland's new line of talk about the glories of faith had a disadvantage for Phillida in that it also fell in with a tendency of her nature and with the habits nourished in her by her father. Millard thought he had reached the depths of her life in coming to know about her work among the poor, but a woman's motives are apt to be more involved than a man imagines or than she can herself quite understand. Below the philanthropic Phillida lay the devout Phillida, who believed profoundly that in her devotions she was able to touch hands with the ever-living God himself. Under the stimulus of Mrs. Frankland's words this belief became so absorbing that the common interests of life became to her remote and almost unreal. Her work in the Mission was more and more her life, and perhaps the necessity for accommodating herself a little to the habits and tastes of a lover was her main preservative from a tendency to degenerate into a devotee.

While Mrs. Frankland aroused others, her eloquence also influenced the orator herself. Advocacy increased the force of conviction, and the growing intensity of conviction in turn reinforced the earnestness of advocacy. Irreverent people applied an old joke and called her "the apostle to the genteels," and in the region to which she seemed commissioned the warmth of her zeal was not likely to work harm. What effect it had was in the main good. But the material in her hands was only combustible in a slow way; the plutocratic conscience is rarely inflammable—for the most part it smolders like punk. Nor was Mrs. Frankland herself in any danger of being carried by her enthusiasms into fanaticism of action. However her utterances might savor of ultraism, she was conservative enough in practical matters to keep a sort of "Truce of God" with the world as she found it.

But to Phillida, susceptible as a saint on the road to beatification, the gradually augmented fervor of Mrs. Frankland's declamation worked evil. It was especially painful to Agatha that her sister was propelled by this influence farther and farther out of the safe lines of commonplace feeling and action, and that every wind from Mrs. Frankland's quarter of the heavens tended to drift her farther and farther away from her lover. Agatha's indignation broke out into all sorts of talk against Mrs. Frankland, whom she did not scruple to denounce for a Pharisee, binding heavy burdens on the back of poor Phillida, but never touching them with her own little finger.

Mrs. Frankland's discourses on faith reached their zenith on a January day, when the carriage wheels that rolled in front of Mrs. Van Horne's made a ringing almost like the breaking of glass in the hard frozen snow of the streets, and when the luxurious comfort within the house was the more deliciously appreciable from the deadly frostiness of the bone-piercing wind without. Only Phillida of all the throng found her comfort disturbed by remembering the coachmen who returned for their mistresses before the end of the discourse. It cost those poor fellows a pang to do despite to their wonted dignity of demeanor by smiting their arms against their bodies to keep from perishing. But even a coachman accustomed to regard himself as the main representative of the unbending perpendicularity of a ten-million family must give way a little before a January north wind in the middle of a cold wave, when his little fur cape becomes a mockery and his hard high hat a misery. However admirable Mrs. Frankland's prolonged sessions may have seemed to the ladies with tear-stained cheeks within the house, it appeared far from laudable as seen from the angle of a coachman's box.

The address on this day followed a reading of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, which is itself the rhapsody of an eloquent man upon faith. If this were written, as some suppose, by Apollos, the orator of the early Church, one may almost fancy that he reads here a bit of one of those addresses wherein speaker and hearer are lifted up together above the meanness and exigencies of mere realism. Mrs. Frankland accompanied the reading of this summary of faith's victory by a comment consisting largely of modern instances carefully selected and told with the tact of a raconteur, so as to leave the maximum impression of each incident unimpaired by needless details. Some of these stories were little short of miraculous; but they were dignified by the manner of telling, which never for an instant degenerated into the babble of a mere wonder-monger.

As usual, Mrs. Frankland, or the oratorical part of her, which was quite the majority of her mind, was carried away by the force of her own speech, and in lauding the success of faith it seemed to her most praiseworthy to push her eulogies unfalteringly to the extreme. You are not to understand that by doing this she vociferated or indulged in vehement gesture. He is only a bastard orator who fancies that loudness and shrillness of tone can enforce conviction. When Mrs. Frankland felt herself about to say extravagant things she intuitively set off her transcendent utterances by assuming a calm demeanor and the air of one who expresses with judicial deliberation the most assured and long-meditated conclusions. So to-day she closed her little Oxford Bible and laid it on the richly inlaid table before her, deliberately depositing her handkerchief upon it and looking about before she made her peroration, which was in something like the following words, delivered with impressive solemnity in a deep, rich voice:

"Why should we always praise faith for what it has done? Has God changed? Faith is as powerful to-day as ever it was since this old world began. If the sick are not healed, if the dead are not raised to-day, be sure it is not God's fault. I am asked if I believe in faith-cure. There is the Bible. It abounds in the divine healing. Nowhere are we told that faith shall some day cease to work wonders. The arm of the Lord is not shortened. O ye of little faith! the victory is within your reach, if you will but rise and seize upon it. I see a vision of a new Church yet to come that shall believe, and, believing as those of old believed, shall see wonders such as the faithful of old saw. The sick shall be healed; women shall receive their dead raised to life again. Why not now? Rise up, O believing heart, and take the Lord at his word!"

Perhaps Mrs. Frankland did not intend that declamation should be accepted at its face value; certainly she did not expect it.

After a hymn, beautifully and touchingly sung, and a brief prayer, ladies put on their sealskin sacques, thrust their jeweled hands into their muffs, and went out to beckon their impatient coachmen, and to carry home with them the solemn impressions made by the discourse, which were in most cases too vague to produce other than a sentimental result. Yet one may not scatter fire with safety unless he can be sure there are no dangerous combustibles within reach. The harm of credulity is that it is liable to set a great flame a-going whenever it reaches that which will burn. A belief in witches is comparatively innocuous until it finds favorable conditions, as at Salem a couple of centuries ago, but, in favorable conditions, the idle speculations of a pedant, or the chimney-corner chatter of old women, may suddenly become as destructive as a pestilence.

It was in the sincere and susceptible soul of Phillida that Mrs. Frankland's words had their full effect. The lust after perfection—the realest peril of great souls—was hers, and she was stung and humiliated by Mrs. Frankland's rebuke to her lack of faith, for the words so impressively spoken seemed to her like a divine message. The whole catalogue of worthies in the eleventh of Hebrews rose up to reprove her.

"I suppose Mrs. Frankland's been talking some more of her stuff," said Agatha at the dinner that evening. "I declare, Phillida, you're a victim of that woman. She isn't so bad. She doesn't mean what she says to be taken as she says it. People always make allowances for mere preaching, you know. But you just swallow it all, and then you get to be so poky a body has no comfort in life. There, now, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings," she added, as she saw the effort her sister was making at self-control.

Phillida lay awake that night long after the normal Agatha, with never an aspiration of the lofty sort, slept the blessed sleep of the heedless. And while the feeble glow of the banked-down fire in the grate draped the objects in the room with grotesque shadows, she went over again the bead-roll of faith in the eleventh of Hebrews and heard again the response of her conscience to the solemn appeal of Mrs. Frankland, and prayed for an increase of faith, and went to sleep at last reflecting on the faith like a germinant mustard grain that should upheave the very mountains and cast them into the midst of the sea.

XVII.
A FAITH CURE.

Phillida's meditations as she walked were occupied with what Mrs. Frankland had said the day before. She reflected that if she herself only possessed the necessary faith she might bring healing to many suffering people. Why not to Wilhelmina? With this thought there came a drawing back—that instinctive resistance of human nature to anything out of the conventional and mediocre; a resistance that in a time of excitement often saves us from absurdity at the expense of reducing us to commonplace. But in Phillida this conservatism was counteracted by a quick imagination in alliance with a passion for moral excellence, both warmed by the fire of youth; and in all ventures youth counts for much.

"Dat is coot; you gomes to see Mina wunst more already," said Mrs. Schulenberg, whom Phillida encountered on the second flight of stairs, descending with a market-basket on her arm. She was not the strong-framed peasant, but of lighter build and somewhat finer fiber than the average immigrant, and her dark hair and eyes seemed to point to South Germany as her place of origin.

"Wilhelmina she so badly veels to-day," added Mrs. Schulenberg. "I don' know"—and she shook her head ominously—"I vas mos' afraid to leef her all py herself already. She is with bein' zick zo tired. She dalk dreadful dis mornin' already; I don' know." And the mother went on down the stairs shaking her head dolefully, while Phillida climbed up to the Schulenberg apartment and entered without knocking, going straight over to the couch where the emaciated girl lay, and kissing her.

Wilhelmina embraced her while Phillida pushed back the hair from the pale, hard forehead with something like a shudder, for it was only skin and skull. In the presence of sympathy Wilhelmina's mood of melancholy desperation relaxed, and she began to shed tears.

"O Miss Callender, you have from black thoughts saved me to-day," she said in a sobbing voice, speaking with a slight German accent. "If I could only die. Here I drag down the whole family already. I make them sorry. Poor Rudolph, he might be somebody if away off he would go wunst; but no, he will not leave me. It is such a nice girl he love; I can see that he love her. But he will say nothing at all. He feels so he must not anyway leave his poor sister; and I hate myself and my life that for all my family is unfortunate. Black thoughts will come. If, now, I was only dead; if I could only find some way myself to put out of the way wunst, for Rudolph it would be better, and after a while the house would not any more so sorry be. Last night I thought much about it; but when falling asleep I saw you plain come in the door and shake your head, and I say, Miss Callender think it wicked. She will not let me. But I am so wicked and unfortunate."

Here the frail form was shaken by hysterical weeping that cut off speech. Phillida shed tears also, and one of them dropped on the emaciated hand of Wilhelmina. Phillida quickly wiped it away with her handkerchief, but another took its place.

"Let it be, Miss Callender," sobbed Wilhelmina; "it will surely make me not so wicked."

She looked up wistfully at Phillida and essayed to speak; then she turned her eyes away, while she said:

"If now, Miss Callender, you would—but may be you will think that it is wicked also."

"Speak freely, dear," said Phillida, softly; "it will do you good to tell me all—all that is in your heart."

"If you would only pray that I might die, then it would be granted already, maybe. I am such a curse, a dreadful curse, to this house."

"No, no; you mustn't say that. Your sickness is a great misfortune to your family, but it is not your fault. It is a greater misfortune to you. Why should you pray to die? Why not pray to get well?"

"That is too hard, Miss Callender. If now I had but a little while been sick. But I am so long. I can not ever get well. Oh, the medicines I have took, the pills and the sarsaparillas and the medicine of the German doctor! And then the American doctor he burnt my back. No; I can't get well any more. It is better as I die. Pray that I die. Will you not?"

"But if God can make you die he can make you well. One is no harder than the other for him."

"No, no; not if I was but a little while sick. But you see it is years since I was sick."

This illogical ground of skepticism Phillida set herself to combat. She read from Wilhelmina's sheepskin-bound Testament, printed in parallel columns in English and German, the story of the miracle at the Pool of Bethesda, the story of the woman that touched the hem of the garment of Jesus, and of other cures told in the New Testament with a pathos and dignity not to be found in similar modern recitals.

Then Phillida, her soul full of hope, talked to Mina of the power of faith, going over the ground traversed by Mrs. Frankland. She read the eleventh of Hebrews, and her face was transformed by the earnestness of her own belief as she advanced. Call it mesmerism, or what you will, she achieved this by degrees, that Wilhelmina thought as she thought, and felt as she felt. The poor girl with shaken nerves and enfeebled vitality saw a vision of health. She watched Phillida closely, and listened eagerly to her words, for to her they were words of life.

"Now, Mina, if you believe, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, all things are possible."

The girl closed her eyes a moment, then she opened them with her face radiant.

"Miss Callender, I do believe."

Already her face was changing under the powerful influence of the newly awakened hope. She folded her hands peacefully, and closed her eyes, whispering:

"Pray, Miss Callender; pray!"

Phillida laid down the Bible and solemnly knelt by the invalid, taking hold of one of her hands. It would have been impossible to listen to the prayer of one so passionately sincere and so believingly devout without falling into sympathy with it. To the bed-ridden and long-despairing Wilhelmina it made God seem something other than she had ever thought him. An hour before she could have believed that God might be persuaded to take her life in answer to prayer, but not that he could be brought to restore her. The moment that Phillida began to pray, a new God appeared to her mind—Phillida's God. Wilhelmina followed the action of Phillida's mind as a hypnotized subject does that of the dominant agent: as Phillida believed, so she believed; Phillida's confidence became hers, and the weak nerves tingled all the way from the nerve-centers with new life.

"Now, Wilhelmina," said Phillida at length, slowly rising from her knees and looking steadily into the invalid's eyes, "the good Lord will make you whole. Rise up and sit upon the bed, believing with all your heart."

In a sort of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the most violent effort to assist her to rise. But a powerful emotion, a tremendous hope, stimulated the languid nerves; the almost disused muscles were galvanized into power; and Wilhelmina succeeded at length in sitting upright without support for the first time in years. When she perceived this actually accomplished she cried out: "O God! I am getting well!"

Wilhelmina's mother had come to the top of the stairs just as Phillida had begun to pray. She paused without the door and listened to the prayer and to what followed. She now burst into the room to see her daughter sitting up on the side of her couch; and then there were embraces and tears, and ejaculations of praise to God in German and in broken English.

"Sit there, Mina, and believe with all your heart," said Phillida, who was exteriorly the calmest of the three; "I will come back soon."

Wilhelmina did as she was bidden. The shock of excitement thus prolonged was overcoming the sluggishness of her nerves. The mother could not refrain from calling in a neighbor who was passing by the open door, and the news of Mina's partial restoration spread through the building. When Phillida got back from the Diet Kitchen with some savory food, the doorway was blocked; but the people stood out of her way with as much awe as they would had she worn an aureole, and she passed in and put the food before Wilhelmina, who ate with a relish she hardly remembered to have known before. The spectators dropped back into the passageway, and Phillida gently closed the door.

"Now, Wilhelmina, lie down and rest. To-morrow you will walk a little. Keep on believing with all your heart."

Having seen the patient, who was fatigued with unwonted exertion, sleeping quietly, Phillida returned home. She said nothing of her experiences of the day, but Millard, who called in the evening, found her more abstracted and less satisfactory than ever. For her mind continually reverted to her patient.

XVIII.
FAITH-DOCTOR AND LOVER.

While the feeble Wilhelmina was eating, Phillida drew the only fairly comfortable chair in the room near to the stove, and, taking from a bed some covering, she spread it over the back and seat of the chair. Then, when the meal was completed, she read from the Acts of the Apostles of the man healed at the gate of the temple by Simon Peter. With the book open in her hand, as she sat, she offered a brief fervent prayer.

"Now, Wilhelmina, doubt nothing," she said. "In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk!"

The invalid had again caught the infection of Phillida's faith, and with a strong effort, helping herself by putting her hand on Phillida's shoulder, she brought herself at length to her feet, where she stood a moment, tottering as though about to fall.

"Walk to the chair, dear, nothing wavering," commanded Phillida, and Mina, with much trembling, let go of Phillida's shoulder, and with sadly unsteady steps tottered forward far enough to lay hold of the back of the chair, and at length succeeded, with much ado, in sitting down without assistance. For years she had believed herself forever beyond hope of taking a step. She leaned back against the pillow placed behind her by Phillida, and wept for very joy.

"But, Miss Callender," she said after a while, "the man you read about in the Bible was made all well at once, and he walked and leaped; but I—"

"Perhaps our faith isn't strong enough," said Phillida. "Maybe it is better for us that you should get well slowly, like the man that Jesus cured of blindness, who, when he first saw men, thought they looked like walking trees. Let us be thankful for what we have, and not complain."

In a few weeks Wilhelmina's mental stimulation and graduated physical exercise had made her able to sit up nearly all day, to walk feebly about the house, and even to render some assistance in such affairs as could be attended to while sitting. The recovery, though it went no farther, was remarkable enough to attract much attention, and the fame of it spread far and wide among the people in the eastern avenues and those connected with the Mission.

This new development of Phillida's life increased her isolation. She could not speak to her family about her faith-cures, nor to Mrs. Hilbrough, and she did not like to confide even in Mrs. Frankland, who would, she felt sure, make too much of the matter. Most of all, it was not in her power to bring herself to say anything to Millard about it. The latter felt, during the three or four weeks that followed the treatment of Wilhelmina, that the veil between him and the inner life of Phillida was growing more opaque. He found no ground to quarrel with Phillida; she was cordial, affectionate, and dutiful toward him, but he felt, with a quickness of intuition characteristic of him, that there was some new cause of constraint between them.

"Phillida," he said one evening, a month after Phillida's work as a faith-doctor had begun, "I wish you would tell me more about your mission work."

"I don't like to speak of that," she replied. "It is too much like boasting of what I am doing." She had no sooner said this than she regretted it; her fierce conscience rose up and charged her with uncandid speech. But how could she be candid?

"I don't like to think," said Millard, "that so large a part of your life—a part that lies so near to your heart—should be shut out from me. I can't do your kind of work. But I can admire it. Won't you tell me about it?"

Phillida felt a keen pang. Had it been a question of her ordinary work in the months that were past she might easily have spoken of it. But this faith-healing would be dangerous ground with Millard. She knew in her heart that it would be better to tell him frankly about it, and face the result. But with him there she could not get courage to bring on an immediate conflict between the affection that was so dear and the work that was so sacred to her.

"Charley," she said slowly, holding on to her left hand as though for safety, "I'm afraid I was not very—very candid in the answer I gave you just now."

"Oh, don't say anything, or tell me anything, dear, that gives you pain," he said with quick delicacy; "and something about this does pain you."

Phillida spoke now in a lower tone, looking down at her hands as she said, with evident effort: "Because you are so good, I must try to be honest with you. There are reasons why I hesitate to tell—to tell—you all about what I am doing. At least this evening, though I know I ought to, and I will—I will—if you insist on it."

"No, dear; no. I will not hear it now."

"But I will tell you all some time. It's nothing very bad, Charley. At least I don't think it is."

"It couldn't be, I'm sure. Nothing bad could exist about you"; and he took her hand in his. "Don't say any more to-night. You are nervous and tired. But some other time, when you feel like it, speak freely. It won't do for us not to open our hearts and lives to each other. If we fail to live openly and truthfully, our little boat will go ashore, Phillida dear—will be wrecked or stranded before we know it."

His voice was full of pleading. How could she refuse to tell him all? But by all the love she felt for him, sitting there in front of her, with his left hand on his knee, looking in her face, and speaking in such an honest, manly way, she was restrained from exposing to him a phase of her life that would seem folly to him while it was a very holy of holies to her. The alternative was cruel.

"Another time, Charley, I mean to tell you all," she said; and she knew when she said it that procrastination would not better the matter, and in the silence that ensued she was just about to change her resolve and unfold the whole matter at once.

But Millard said: "Don't trouble yourself. I'm sorry I have hurt you. Remember that I trust you implicitly. If you feel a delicacy in speaking to me about anything, let it go."

The conversation after this turned on indifferent matters; but it remained constrained, and Millard took his leave early.

XIX.
PROOF POSITIVE.

"W'y yes, Charley; I thought you knew. Henry always had peculiar views," she said, laughing gently, as was her wont, at her husband's oddities. "He has especially disliked preachers and doctors. Lately he has got the notion that the churches do not believe the Bible literally enough. There were two Swedes and one Swiss in his shop who agreed with him. From reading the Bible in their way and reading other books and papers they have adopted what is called Christian Science. They have found some other men and women who believe as they do, and a kind of a Christian Science woman doctor who talks to them a little—a good enough woman in her way, I suppose—and they think that by faith, or rather by declaring that there is no such thing as a real disease, and believing themselves well, they can cure all diseases."

"All except old age and hunger?" queried Millard.

The aunt smiled, and went on. "But father and his woman doctor or preacher don't agree with your Miss Callender. They say her cures are all right as far as they go, but that she is only a babe, unable to take strong meat. The Christian Science woman in Fourteenth street, now, they say, knows all about it, and works her cures scientifically, and not blindly as Miss Callender does."

This allusion to cures by Phillida set Millard into a whirl of feeling. That she had been doing something calculated to make her the subject of talk brought a rush of indignant feeling, but all his training as a man of society and as a man of business inclined him to a prudent silence under excitement. He turned his derby hat around and around, examining the crown by touch, and then, reversing it, he scrutinized the address of the hatter who did not make it. Though he had come all the way to Avenue C to make a confidante of his aunt, he now found it impossible to do so. She had rejoiced so much in his betrothal to her friend, how could he let her see how far apart he and Phillida had drifted? For some minutes he managed to talk with her about her own family matters, and then turned back to Phillida again.

"Tell me, Aunt Hannah, all you know about Miss Callender's cures. I don't like to ask her because she and I disagree so widely on some things that we do not like to talk about them."

His aunt saw that Charley was profoundly disturbed. She therefore began with some caution, as treading on unknown ground, in talking with him about Phillida.

"I don't know what to think about these things, Charley. But in anything I say you must understand that I love Miss Callender almost as much as you do, and if anybody can cure by faith she can. In fact, she has had wonderful success in some cures. Besides, she's no money-maker, like the woman doctor in Fourteenth street, who takes pay for praying over you, and rubbing your head, maybe. You know about the cure of Wilhelmina Schulenberg, of course?"

"No; not fully. We haven't liked to talk about it. Wilhelmina is the poor creature that has been in bed so long."

This mere fencing was to cover the fact that Millard had not heard anything of the miracle in Wilhelmina's case. But seeing his aunt look at him inquiringly, he added:

"Is she quite cured, do you think—this Miss Schulenberg?"

"No; but she can sit up and walk about. She got better day after day under Miss Callender's praying, but lately, I think, she is at a standstill. Well, that was the first, and it made a great talk. And I don't see but that it is very remarkable. Everybody in the tenement house was wild about it, and Miss Callender soon came to be pointed at by the children on the street as 'the woman doctor that can make you well by praying over you.' Then there was the wife of the crockery-store man in Avenue A. She had hysterical fits, or something of the sort, and she got well after Miss Callender visited her three or four times. And another woman thought her arm was paralyzed, but Miss Callender made her believe, and she got so she could use it. But old Mr. Greenlander, the picture-frame maker in Twentieth street, didn't get any better. In fact, he never pretended to believe that he would."

"What was the matter with him?" asked Millard, his lips compressed and his brows contracted.

"Oh, he had a cataract over his eye. He's gone up to the Eye and Ear Hospital to have it taken off. I don't suppose faith could be expected to remove that."

"It doesn't seem to work in surgical cases," said Millard.

"But several people with nervous troubles and kind of breakdowns have got better or got well, and naturally they are sounding the praises of Miss Callender's faith," added his aunt.

"Do you think Phillida likes all this talk about her?"

"No. This talk about her is like hot coals to her feet. She suffers dreadfully. She said last Sunday that she wondered if Christ did not shrink from the talk of the crowds that followed him more than he did from crucifixion itself. She is wonderful, and I don't wonder the people believe that she can work miracles. If anybody can in these days, she is the one."

Millard said nothing for a time; he picked at the lining of his hat, and then put it down on the table and looked out of the window. His irritation against Phillida had by this time turned into affectionate pity for her self-imposed suffering—a pity rendered bitter by his inability to relieve her.

"Do you think that Phillida begins to suspect that perhaps she has made a mistake?" he asked after a while.

"No. I'm not so sure she has. No doctor cures in all cases, and even Christ couldn't heal the people in Nazareth who hadn't much faith."

"She will make herself a byword in the streets," said Millard in a tone that revealed to his aunt his shame and anguish.

"Charley," said Mrs. Martin, "don't let yourself worry too much about Miss Callender. She is young yet. She may be wrong or she may be right. I don't say but she goes too far. She's a house plant, you know. She has seen very little of the world. If she was like other girls she would just take up with the ways of other people and not make a stir. But she has set out to do what she thinks is right at all hazards. Presently she will get her lesson, and some of her oddities will disappear, but she'll never be just like common folks. Mind my words, Charley, she's got the making of a splendid woman if you'll only give her time to get ripe."

"I believe that with all my heart," said Millard, with a sigh.

"I tell you, Charley, I do believe that her prayers have a great effect, for the Bible teaches that. Besides, she don't talk any of the nonsense of father's Christian Science woman. I can understand what Phillida's about. But Miss what's-her-name, in Fourteenth street, can't explain to save her life, so's you can understand, how she cures people, or what she's about, except to earn money in some way easier than hard work. There comes your uncle, loaded to the muzzle for a dispute," said Aunt Hannah, laughing mischievously as she heard her husband's step on the stairs.

Uncle Martin greeted Charley with zest. It was no fun to talk to his wife, who never could be drawn into a discussion, but held her husband's vagaries in check as far as possible by little touches of gentle ridicule. But Mr. Martin was sure that he could overwhelm Charley Millard, even though he might not convince him. So when he had said, "How-are-yeh, and glad to see yeh, Charley, and hope yer well, and how's things with you?" he sat down, and presently opened his battery.

"You see, Charley, our Miss Bowyer, the Christian Science healer, is well-posted about medicine and the Bible. She says that the world is just about to change. Sin and misery are at the bottom of sickness, and all are going to be done away with by spirit power. God and the angel world are rolling away the rock from the sepulchre, and the sleeping spirit of man is coming forth. People are getting more susceptible to magnetic and psy—psy-co-what-you-may-call-it influences. This is bringing out new diseases that the old doctors are only able to look at with dumb amazement."

Here Uncle Martin turned his thumbs outward with a flourish, and the air of a lad who had solved a problem on a blackboard. At the same time he dropped his head forward and gazed at Charley, who was not even amused.

"What are her proofs?" demanded Millard, wearily.

"Proofs?" said Uncle Martin, with a sniff, as he reared his head again. "Proofs a plenty. You just come around and hear her explain once about the vermic—I can't say the word—the twistifying motion of the stomach and what happens when the nerve-force gets a set-back and this motion kind of winds itself upward instead of downward, and the nerve-force all flies to the head. Proofs?" Here Uncle Martin paused, ill at ease. "Just notice the cases. The proof is in the trying of it. The cures are wonderful. You first get the patient into a state where you can make him think as you do. Then you will that he shall forget all about his diseases. You make him feel well, and you've done it."

"I suppose you could cure him by forgetfulness easily enough. I saw an old soldier with one leg yesterday; he was drunk in the street. And he had forgotten entirely that one leg was gone. But he didn't seem to walk any better."

"That don't count, Charley, and you're only making fun. You see there is a philosophy in this, and you ought to hear it from somebody that can explain it."

"I'd like to find somebody who could," said Charley.

"Well, now, how's this? Miss Bowyer—she's a kind of a preacher as well as a doctor—she says that God is good, and therefore he couldn't create evil. You see? Well, now, God created everything that is, so there can not be any evil. At least it can't have any real, independent—what-you-may-call-it existence. You see, Charley?"

"Yes; what of it?"

"Well, then, sickness and sin are evil. But this argument proves that they don't really exist at all. They're only magic-lantern shadows so to speak. You see? Convince the patient that he is well, and he is well." Here Uncle Martin, having pointed out the easy road to universal health, looked in solemn triumph from under his brows.

"Yes," said Millard, "that's just an awfully good scheme. But if you work your argument backward it will prove that as evil exists there isn't any good God. But if it's true that sin and disease have no real existence, we'll do away with hanging and electrocution, as they call it, and just send for Miss Bowyer to convince a murderer that murder is an evil, and so it can't have any real independent existence in a universe made by a good God."

"Well, Charley, you make fun of serious things. You might as well make fun of the miracles in the Bible."

"Now," said Millard, "are the cures wrought by Christian Science miracles, or are they founded on philosophy?"

"They're both, Charley. It's what they call the psy-co-what-you-may-call-it mode of cure. But it's all the same as the miracles of the Bible," said Uncle Martin.

"Oh, it is," said Millard, gayly, for this tilt had raised his spirits. "Now the miracles in the Bible are straight-out miracles. Nobody went around in that day to explain the vermicular motion of the stomach or the upward action of nerve-force, or the psychopathic value of animal magnetism. Some of the Bible miracles would stump a body to believe, if they were anywhere else but in the Bible; but you just believe in them as miracles by walking right straight up to them, looking the difficulty in the eye, and taking them as they are because you ought to." Here Charley saw his aunt laughing gently at his frank way of stating the processes of his own mind. Smiling in response, he added: "You believe them, or at least I do, because I can't have my religion without them. But your Christian psychopathists bring a lot of talk about a science, and they don't seem to know just whether God is working the miracle or they are doing it by magnetism, or mind-cure, or psychopathy, or whether the disease isn't a sort of plaguey humbug anyhow, and the patient a fool who has to be undeceived."

"W'y, you see, Charley, we know more nowadays, and we understand all about somnambulism and hyp-what-you-may-call-it, and we understand just how the miracles in the Bible were worked. God works by law—don't you see?"

"The apostles did not seem to understand it?" asked Charley.

"No; they were mere faith-doctors, like Miss Callender, for instance, doing their works in a blind sort of way."

"The apostles will be mere rushlights when you get your Christian Science well a-going," said Charley, seriously. Then he rose to leave, having no heart to await the return of the children.

"Of course," said Uncle Martin, "the world is undergoing a change, Charley. A great change. Selfishness and disease shall vanish away, and the truth of science and Christianity prevail." Uncle Martin was now standing, and swinging his hands horizontally in outward gestures, with his elbows against his sides.

"Well, I wish to goodness there was some chance of realizing your hopes," said Charley, conciliatorily. "I must go. Good-by, Uncle Martin; good-by, Aunt Hannah."

Uncle Martin said good-by, and come again, Charley, and always glad to see you, you know, and good luck to you. And Millard went down the stairs and bent his steps homeward. As the exhilaration produced by his baiting of Uncle Martin's philosophy died away, his heart sank with sorrowful thoughts of Phillida and her sufferings, and with indignant and mortifying thoughts of how she would inevitably be associated in people's minds with mercenary quacks and disciples of a sham science.

He would go to see her at once. The defeat of Uncle Martin had given him courage. He would turn the same battery on Phillida. No; not the same. He could not ridicule her. She was never quite ridiculous. Her plane of motive was so high that his banter would be a desecration. It was not in his heart to add to the asperity of her martyrdom by any light words. But perhaps he could find some way to bring her to a more reasonable course.