out like a young tyrant, adoring
Tray--the most guileless, helpless, petted simpleton of a child-woman
that ever existed. The second May was at the present date the more
prominent and prevailing of the two, so much so that all the
sharp-tongued, practical-minded ladies in Redcross made a unanimous
remark. Dr. and Mrs. Millar's youngest daughter was the most
disgracefully spoilt, badly brought-up, childish creature for her years
whom the critics knew. It was a poor preparation in view of her having
to work to maintain herself. They could not tell what was to become of
her.

At first May lamented, day and night, over the fate of Phyllis Carey, to
have to stand behind counters, sort drawers full of ribands, tape, and
reels of cotton, and wait on her townswomen! May could think of no
fitting parallel unless the pathetic one of that miserable young
princess apprenticed to the button-maker, dying with her cheek on an
open Bible, at the text, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest."

Then, as Phyllis accommodated herself to the new yoke, and found it not
so galling as she had expected it to be, her friend May altered her tone
with sympathetic quickness, and reflected Phyllis's change of mood
almost before the mood was established. Phyllis was in mental
constitution like her father, single-hearted and submissive--not bright
any more than Bell Hewett was bright, but contented and trustful as long
as she was suffered to be so. She had been enduring harder and harder
lines at home. She found existence actually brightening instead of
darkening round her when she was transferred to "Robinson's." For
everybody, knowing all about her and her father and mother, with their
altered circumstances, began, at least, by treating her with kindly
respect and forbearance, in spite of Mrs. Carey's austere request that
she should be dealt with exactly like the other shop-girls.

Shop-work, in which Phyllis was to be gradually trained, felt
comparatively easy to a girl who had been taken from school and
launched into the coarsest drudgery of house-work under an
inexperienced, flurried, over-burdened maid-of-all-work. Mrs. Carey was
sufficiently just to exact no more home-work from Phyllis, and to
arrange that she should have her time to herself, like other shop-girls,
after "Robinson's" was closed, while the master of "Robinson's" was
inflexible in setting his face against late hours, except for the elde