was swept into a rhetorical dustpan, and she could feel herself at
length as a human soul without having to remember her possessions. Mrs.
Frankland's phrase of "the weary rich" exactly fitted her, and to her
Mrs. Frankland's eloquent pulverizing of the glory of this world brought
a sort of emancipation.

Mrs. Frankland unfolded to her a desire to reach those who would not
attend her readings at any but a very fashionable house. Mrs. Van Horne,
encouraged thereto by Mrs. Hilbrough, was delighted at finding a novel
and congenial use for some of the luxurious and pompous upholstery of
her life of which she was so tired. Her parlors were opened, and
"persons of the highest fashion" were pleased to find a private and
suitably decorated wicker-gate leading into a strait and narrow
vestibule train, limited, fitted up with all the consolations and
relieved of most of the discomforts of an old-fashioned religious
pilgrimage.

XIV.

MRS. FRANKLAND AND PHILLIDA.

Mrs. Callender would have told you that mountain air had quite restored
her, but enforced rest from scissors and sewing-machine, the two demons
that beset the dear industrious, had more to do with it than mountain
air. The first of October brought her and Phillida again to their house,
where Agatha had preceded them by two days, to help Sarah in putting
things to rights for their advent. Millard met the mother and daughter
at the station with a carriage and left them at their own door.

"Did Mr. Millard say that he would come again this evening?" Agatha
asked of Phillida when she rose from the dinner-table.

"No."

"Well, I should think he would. I wouldn't have a young man that would
take things so coolly. He's hardly seen you at all since his return,
and--that's the expressman with the trunks. I'll go and see about them";
and she bounded away, not "like an antelope," but like a young girl
bubbling to the brim with youth and animal spirits.

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