on which I would rather she should have stayed at home."

"I'm sure Phillida is nice enough for anybody," said Hilbrough,
sturdily. "I don't see how she interferes with your plan."

"Well, Mr. Millard'll think I've asked her specially to help entertain
him, and Phillida is so peculiar. She's nobody in particular, socially,
and it will seem an unskillful thing to have asked her--and then she has
ideas. Young girls with notions of their own are--well--you know."

"Yes, I know, home-made ideas are a little out of fashion," laughed
Hilbrough. "But I'll bet he likes her. Millard isn't a fool if he does
part his hair in the middle and carry his cane balanced in his fingers
like a pair of steelyards."

"If he takes me to dinner, you must follow with Phillida. Give your left
arm--"

"I'll feel like a fool escorting Phillida--"

"But you must if Mr. Millard escorts me."

Hilbrough could have cursed Millard. He hated what he called "flummery."
Why couldn't people walk to the table without hooking themselves
together, and why couldn't they eat their food without nonsense? But he
showed his vexation in a characteristic way by laughing inwardly at his
wife and Millard, and most of all at himself for an old fool.

Phillida Callender was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who had
gone as missionary to one of the Oriental countries. After years of life
in the East, Mr. Callender had returned to America on account of his
wife's health, and had settled in Brooklyn. If illusions of his youth
had been dispelled in the attempt to convert Orientals to a belief in
the Shorter Catechism he never confessed it, even to himself, and he
cherished the notion that he would some day return to his missionary
vocation. The family had an income from the rent of a house in New York
that had been inherited by Mrs. Callender, and the husband received
considerable sums for supplying the pulpits of vacant churches. He had
occupied the pulpit of the church that the Hilbroughs attended during
the whole time of Dr. North's journey to the Holy Land, and had thus
come into a half-pastoral relation to the Hilbrough family. Mr.
Callender sickened and died; the fragile wife and two daughters were
left to plan their lives without him. The sudden shock and the new draft
upon Mrs. Callender's energies had completed her restoration to a
tolerable degree of health and activity. Between the elder daughter,
whom the father had fancifully named Phillida, from