r
hands on one evening in the week. Everybody was good to Phyllis, who, in
truth, just because she was enough of a little lady to be free from
arrogance and assumption, while she was willing to do her best to oblige
her neighbours, provoked no harsh treatment. Above all Tom Robinson for
one person could not be too considerate to her.

Miss Franklin looked on Phyllis Carey as a godsend, a harbinger of other
better-class girls going into trade. The woman not only took the girl
under her wing, she fell back instinctively and inevitably on Phyllis
for companionship, with a selection flattering in a woman to a girl.

Then a complete revolution was wrought in May's opinions and wishes.
Nothing would serve her but that she too must go as a shop-girl to
"Robinson's," and share the fortunes of her friend.

May did not yet confide her purpose to her father and mother, but she
poured it in daily and nightly outbursts into the startled ears of
Dora, to whom the hallucination sounded like a mocking retribution on
the young Millars' old scornful estimate of shopkeepers and shops. May
stuck to her point with a tenacity which, touching as it did a tender,
trembling chord in Dora's heart, threatened also to subvert her
judgment, that was at once sounder and more matured than May's.

The vibrating chord lay in the knowledge that May too was destined to
quit Redcross at no distant day, with the aching reluctance of Dora to
give her up, and to find herself in the position that domineering,
selfish girls sometimes covet--that of being the only girl at home,
having none to share with her in the rights and privileges of the
daughter of the house.

A sort of feverish anxiety, which was in itself ominous, had taken hold
of Dr. Millar to see all he had projected accomplished in so far as it
was still possible. That is, he would fain set in motion, at least, the
wheels which would carry out his purpose. Perhaps he had reason to
distrust his health and life; perhaps it was simply that he was not
insensible to the fact, that money had a trick of running through his
fingers and those of Mrs. Millar like water, though they did their best
to catch it up and arrest it in its rapid course. Mrs. Millar's little
private income was still in part free, and not engulfed in the needs of
the household at Redcross, as it might not long continue. Rose had only
sixty pounds of it, and Annie fifteen for pocket-money till she should
have passed her probation a