varied from the
consecrated commonplace.

The door-bell rang, and Mrs. Gouverneur, who had intended that Phillida
and Millard should each consider the other a mere coincidence, was a
little disconcerted to have them enter together at a later time than she
had set, and with an air of slight fatigue, as though they had come from
a long walk. And, moreover, without a chaperon. The acquaintance was
progressing more rapidly than she had expected.

Millard smilingly explained: "I encountered Miss Callender in a very
unfashionable quarter of the city, and I thought it my duty to take
charge of her."

At ten o'clock that evening Phillida was escorted to her home, her
cousin Philip Gouverneur walking on one side and Millard on the other.
She left them with a pleased sense of having passed an uncommonly happy
afternoon and evening, but was alarmed, nevertheless, to think what a
romance Agatha would build out of the encounter with Mr. Millard in
Avenue C and the detected contrivance of Aunt Gouverneur.

And when she had finished deprecating Agatha's raptures and had escaped
her sister's further questions by going to bed, Phillida found that her
own imagination had at length been set a-going, and her pillow reveries
kept her awake. Why was it always Mr. Millard? She had chanced upon him
at Mrs. Hilbrough's; his desire to bring Mrs. Gouverneur to the
Hilbrough reception had made him her escort; and now most unexpectedly
she finds that he and she are intimates and, in a sense, benefactors in
the same tenement in Avenue C; they are companions in a walk, and again
guests at the same table. It made her superstitious; these coincidences
looked like fate--or rather like a special manifestation of the will of
Providence--to the mind of Phillida Callender.

Undeniably there was something in Charles Millard that attracted her. He
was not just of her own kind, but if he had been would she have liked
him so well? Certainly the young men at the mission, exemplary fellows
that they were, did not excite even a languid interest in her mind.
Millard took life less seriously than she did, but perhaps that very
otherness was agreeable: when one is prone by nature to travel dusty
paths and dutifully to wound one's feet on mountainous rocky roads, a
companion who habitually beckons to green sward and shady seats, who
makes life put on a little more of the air of a picnic excursion into
the world, is a source of refreshment. She now knew that Milla