"That will be very good, indeed"; and Phillida's face lost for a moment
the blushing half-confusion that had marked it during the conversation,
and a look of clear pleasure shone in her eyes--the enthusiastic
pleasure of doing good and making happiness. Millard hardly rose to the
height of her feeling; it was not to be expected. Whenever her face
assumed this transfigured look his heart was smitten with pain--the
mingled pain of love intensified and of hope declining; for this
exaltation seemed to put Phillida above him, and perhaps out of his
reach. Why should she fly away from him in this way?

"And may I come--to-morrow evening, perhaps--to inquire about this
matter?" he said, making a movement to depart.

The question brought Phillida to the earth again, for Millard spoke with
a voice getting beyond his control and telling secrets that he would
fain have kept back. His question, tremulously put, seemed to ask so
much more than it did! She responded in a voice betraying emotion quite
out of keeping with the answer to a question like this, and with her
face suffused, and eyes unable to look steadily at his, which were
gazing into hers.

"Certainly, Mr. Millard," she said.

He took her hand gently and with some tremor as he said good-evening,
and then he descended the brownstone steps aware that all debate and
hesitancy were at an end. Come what might come, he knew himself to be
irretrievably in love with Phillida Callender. This was what he had
gained by abstaining from the sight of her for four weeks.

When the elevator had landed him on one of the high floors of the
Graydon Building, a bachelor apartment house, and he had entered his own
parlor, the large windows of which had a southern outlook, he stood a
long time regarding the view. The electric lights were not visible, but
their white glow, shining upward from the streets and open squares,
glorified the buildings that were commonplace enough in daytime. Miles
away across a visible space of water Liberty's torch shone like a star
of the fifth magnitude. The great buildings about the City Hall Park,
seen through a haze of light, seemed strangely aerial, like castles in a
mirage or that ravishing Celestial City which Bunyan gazed upon in his
dreams. A curved line of electric stars well up toward the horizon
showed where the great East River Bridge spanned the unresting tides
far below. Millard's apartment was so high that the street roar reached
it in a dull