You will be
sorry, mother, so sorry, when poor unfortunate Wilhelmina, that has
always been such a trouble, is gone already."

This talk from the smitten creature broke down Phillida's self-control,
and she wept with the others. Then in despondency she started home. But
at the bottom of the stairs she turned back and climbed again to the
top, and, re-entering the tenement, she called Mrs. Schulenberg to her.
"You'd better get a doctor."

Wilhelmina with the preternaturally quick hearing of a feverish invalid
caught the words and said: "No. What is the use? The doctor will want
some of poor Rudolph's money. What good can the doctor do? I am just so
good as dead already."

"But, Wilhelmina dear," said Phillida, coming over to her, "we have no
right to leave the matter this way. If you die, then Rudolph and your
mother will say, 'Ah, if we'd only had a doctor!'"

"That is true," gasped Mina. "Send for Dr. Beswick, mother."

A neighbor was engaged to carry the message to Dr. Beswick in
Seventeenth street, and Phillida went her way homeward, slowly and in
dejection.

XXVIII.

DR. BESWICK'S OPINION.

Dr. Beswick of East Seventeenth street was a man from the country, still
under thirty, who had managed to earn money enough to get through the
College of Physicians and Surgeons by working as a school-teacher
between times. Ambitious as such self-lifted country fellows are apt to
be, he had preferred to engage in the harsh competition of the
metropolis in hope of one day achieving professional distinction. To a
poor man the first necessity is an immediate livelihood. Such favorite
cross-streets of the doctors as Thirty-fourth, and the yet more
fashionable doctor-haunted up-and-down thoroughfares, were for long
years to come far beyond the reach of a man without money or social
backing, though Beswick saw visions of a future. He had planted himself
in Mackerelville, where the people must get their medical advice cheap,
and where a young doctor might therefore make a beginning. The
sweetheart of his youth had entered the Training School for Nurses just
when he had set out to study medicine. They two had waited long, but she
had saved a few dollars, and at the end of his second year in practice,
his income having reached a precarious probability of five hundred a
year, they had married and set up office and house together in two
rooms and a dark closet. There were advantages in this condensed
arrangement, since th