at afternoon with
expectation that some message would be providentially sent for her
guidance. The spirit perplexed is ever superstitious. Since so many
important decisions in life must be made blindly, one does not wonder
that primitive men settled dark questions by studying the stars, by
interpreting the flight of birds, the whimsical zigzags of the lightning
bolt, or the turning of the beak of a fowl this way or that in picking
corn. The human mind bewildered is ever looking for crevices in the
great mystery that inwraps the visible universe, and ever hoping that
some struggling beam from beyond may point to the best path.

XXIII.

A SHINING EXAMPLE.

Mrs. Hilbrough and Phillida Callender sat together that day at Mrs.
Frankland's readings and heard her with very different feelings
discourse of discipleship, culling texts from various parts of the four
gospels to set forth the courage and self-denial requisite and the
consolation and splendid rewards that awaited such as were really
disciples. Now that she had undertaken to look after Phillida in the
interest of Millard, Mrs. Hilbrough trembled at the extreme statements
that Mrs. Frankland allowed herself to make in speaking of self-denial
as the crowning glory of the highest type of discipleship. The speaker
was incapable of making allowance for oriental excess in Bible language;
it suited her position as an advocate to take the hyperbolic words of
Jesus in an occidental literalness. But Mrs. Hilbrough thought her most
dangerous when she came to cite instances of almost inconceivable
self-sacrifice from Christian biography. The story of Francis of Assisi
defending himself against the complaint of his father by disrobing in
the presence of the judge and returning into his father's hands the last
thread of raiment bought with the father's money that he might free
himself from the parental claim, was likely to excite a Platonic
admiration in the minds of Mrs. Van Horne's friends, but such sublime
self-sacrifice is too far removed from prevailing standards to be
dangerous in New York. Mrs. Frankland no more expected her hearers to
emulate St. Francis than she dreamed of refusing anything beautiful
herself. But Mrs. Hilbrough knew Phillida, and, having known the spirit
that was in her father, she was able to measure pretty accurately the
tremendous effect of this mode of speech upon her in her present state
of mind. While the address went on Mrs. Hilbrough plan