I wanted to die wunst already; you remember it. But ever since I
have been better it has made my mother and Rudolph so happy again. If
now I die what will mother do?"

The spectacle of the emaciated girl wrestling for breath and panting
with fever, while her doom was written upon her face, oppressed the mind
of Phillida. Was it possible that prayer could save one so visibly
smitten? She turned and looked at the mother standing just inside the
door, her face wrung with the agony of despair while she yet watched
Phillida with eagerness to see if she had anything to propose that
promised relief. Then a terrible sense of what was expected of her by
mother and daughter came over her mind, and her spirits sank as under
the weight of a millstone.

Phillida was not one of those philanthropists whom use has enabled to
look on suffering in a dry and professional way. She was most
susceptible on the side of her sympathies. Her depression came from
pity, and her religious exaltation often came from the same source.
After a minute of talk and homely ministry to Wilhelmina's comfort,
Phillida's soul rose bravely to its burden. The threat of bereavement
that hung over the widow and her son, the shadow of death that fell upon
the already stricken life of the unfortunate young woman, might be
dissipated by the goodness of God. The sphere into which Phillida rose
was not one of thought but one of intense and exalted feeling. The
sordid and depressing surroundings--the dingy and broken-backed chairs,
the cracked and battered cooking-stove, the ancient chest of drawers
without a knob left upon it, the odor of German tenement cookery and of
feather-beds--vanished now. Wilhelmina, for her part, held Phillida fast
by the hand and saw no one but her savior, and Phillida felt a moving of
the heart that one feels in pulling a drowning person from the water,
and that uplifting of the spirit that comes to those of the true
prophetic temperament. She read in a gentle, fervent voice some of the
ancient miracles of healing from the English columns of the
leather-covered German and English Testament, while the exhausted
Wilhelmina still held her hand and wrestled for the breath of life.

Then Phillida knelt by the well-worn wooden-bottom chair while Mrs.
Schulenberg knelt by a stool on the other side of the stove, burying her
face in her apron. Never was prayer more sincere, never was prayer more
womanly or more touching. As Phillida proceeded with