ship. She could
have envied Mrs. Beswick her poverty with her right to defend the man
she loved. She felt an increasing interest in the quiet, broad-faced,
wholesome-looking woman, and she answered:

"I know, Mrs. Beswick, your husband is not so much to blame. I spoke too
hastily. I am a little too sensitive on that point. I don't pretend to
like to be talked about and called a faith-doctor."

There was an awkward pause, which the doctor broke by saying presently
in a subdued voice:

"In regard to your perfectly proper question, Miss Callender, I will say
that the Schulenberg young woman has acute pulmonary tuberculosis."

"Which means?" queried Phillida, contracting her brows.

"What people call galloping consumption," said the doctor. "Now, I can't
help saying, Miss Callender,"--the doctor's habitual self-contentment
regained sway in his voice and manner,--"that this particular sort of
consumption is one of the things that neither medicine nor faith was
ever known to heal since the world was made. This young woman's lungs
are full of miliary tubercles--little round bodies the size of a millet
seed. The tissues are partly destroyed already. You might as well try to
make an amputated leg grow on again by medicine or by prayer as to try
to reconstruct her lungs by similar means. She has got to die, and I
left her only some soothing medicine, and told her mother there was no
use of making a doctor's bill."

There was a straightforward rectitude in Dr. Beswick that inclined
Phillida to forgive his bluntness of utterance and lack of manner. Here
at least was no managing of a patient to get money, after the manner
hinted at by Miss Bowyer. The distinction between diseases that might
and those that might not be cured or mitigated by a faith-process, which
Phillida detected in the doctor's words, quickened again the doubts
which had begun to assail her regarding the soundness of the belief on
which she had been acting, and awakened a desire to hear more. She
wanted to ask him about it, but sensitiveness regarding her private
affairs made her shrink. In another moment she had reflected that it
would be better to hear what was to be said on this subject from a
stranger than from one who knew her. The natural honesty and courage of
her nature impelled her to submit further to Dr. Beswick's rather blunt
knife.

"You seem to think that some diseases are curable by faith and some not,
Dr. Beswick," she said.

"Certainly,"