ed 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
_eloignement_. 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 SEANCE AT MRS. VAN HORNE'S.

The Bible reader was no polemic. People of every sect were gathered
under the wings of her sympathies. In vain dogmatic advisers warned her
against Unitarians who believe too little, and Swedenborgians who
believe too much. Mrs. Frankland's organ of judgment lay in her
affections and emotions, and those who felt as she felt were accepted
without contradiction, or, as she put it, mostly in Scripture phrase,
which she delivered in a rich orotund voice: "Let us receive him that is
weak in the faith, but not to doubtful disputation."

A certain sort of combativeness she had, but it was combativeness with
the e