past so thickly peopled by memories of him. Now
that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and metaphysical
healer of ailments the substantial existence of which she denied, had
cast a shadow upon her, Phillida realized for the first time the source
of that indignant protest of Millard's which had precipitated the
breaking of their engagement. Her name was on men's lips in the same
class with this hard-cheeked professor of religious flummery, this
mercenary practitioner of an un-medical imposture calculated to cheat
the unfortunate by means of delusive hopes. How such mention of her must
have stung a proud-spirited lover of propriety like Millard! For the
first time she could make allowance and feel grateful for his chivalrous
impulse to defend her.

No child is just like a parent. Phillida differed from her strenuous
father in nature by the addition of esthetic feeling. Her education had
not tended to develop this, but it made itself felt. Her lofty notions
of self-sacrifice were stimulated by a love for the sublime. Other
young girls read romances; Phillida tried to weave her own life into
one. The desire for the beautiful, the graceful, the externally
appropriate, so long denied and suppressed, furnished the basis of her
affection for Millard. A strong passion never leaves the nature the
same, and under the influence of Millard her esthetic sense had grown.
Nothing that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer had said assailed the logical
groundwork of her faith. But during the hours following that
conversation it was impossible for her to reflect with pleasure, as had
been her wont, on the benefits derived from her prayers by those who had
been healed in whole or in part through her mediation. A remembrance of
the jargon of the Christian Scientist mingled with and disturbed her
meditations; the case of a belief in rheumatism and the case of a belief
in consumption with goitre stood grinning at her like rude burlesques of
her own cures, making ridiculous the work that had hitherto seemed so
holy. But when the morrow came she was better able to disentangle her
thoughts of healing from such phrases as "the passive impressible state"
and "interior perception." And when at length the remembrance of Miss
Bowyer had grown more dim, the habitual way of looking at her work
returned.

One morning about ten days later, while she was at breakfast, the
basement door-bell was rung, and when the servant answered it Phillida
heard some on