ou have given
me. I don't think I shall agree with it, but I'll think about it." Then
in a low voice she added, "If I have made a mistake it has cost me
dear--nobody knows how dear."

After he had left her Philip's buoyancy declined. These last words,
evidently full of regrets as regarded her relation with Charley, gave
him a twinge of his old jealousy and restored him to his habitual
discouragement.

XXXI.

A CASE OF BELIEF IN DIPHTHERIA.

It was inevitable that Phillida should turn Philip's talk over in her
mind again and again. There were moments when she felt that her healing
power might be as much of a delusion as the divinity in the touch of the
merry King Charles. There were other times when Dr. Beswick's infecting
bacteria germinated in her imagination and threatened destruction to her
faith, and yet other times when sheer repulsion from Miss Bowyer's cant
of metaphysical and Christian therapeutics inclined her to renounce the
belief in faith-cure, which seemed somehow a second cousin to this
grotesque science. But the great barrier remained; in her mind
faith-healing had associated itself with other phases of religious
belief, and she could find no resting-place for her feet betwixt her
faith and Philip's ill-concealed general skepticism. She did go so far
as to adopt Philip's opinion that an exclusive occupation of the mind
with the immensities rendered life unendurable. She came to envy her
cousin his eagerness over unreadable Indian Bibles, black-letter
Caxtons, and a rare date on a title-page. She envied Millard the
diversion that came to him from his interest in people, his taste in
dress, his care for the small proprieties, his love for all the minor
graces of life. Why should she alone of the three be crushed beneath the
trip-hammer of the immensities? But she ended always as she had begun,
by reverting to that ancestral spirit of religious strenuousness in
which she had been bred and cradled, and by planting herself once more
upon the eleventh of Hebrews and the renowned victories of faith that
had been the glory of the Church in every age. To leave this ground
seemed to her an abandonment by consequence of all that was dearest and
noblest in life. Nor was she aware that with each cross-examination her
hold on the cherished belief became less firm.

About two weeks after her talk with Philip she had just concluded a
fresh conflict of this sort, and settled herself once more in what she
in