"Then I don't know what to think," said the invalid. "It was sent up from a place down in Grand street already, with my name on a ticket and the word 'Paid' marked on the ticket. I wish I could thank the one that gave it to me wunst already, for I don't feel like it belonged to me till I do."
Phillida turned about and looked at Millard, who still lurked behind her. When he met her penetrating gaze he colored as though he had been caught doing wrong.
"Miss Schulenberg, this is Mr. Millard," said Phillida. "I don't know who sent you this chair; but if you thank him the person who paid for your chair will hear about it, I feel sure."
Mina looked at Millard. The faultlessness of his dress and the perfection of style in his carriage abashed her. But she presently reached her emaciated hand to him, while tears stood in her eyes. Millard trembled as he took the semi-translucent fingers in his hand: they looked brittle, and he could feel the joints through his gloves as though it were a skeleton that thus joined hands with him.
"You gave me my chair!" she said. "Yesterday I was out in it for the first time already—in Tompkins Square. But to-day Rudolph here—he is such a good fellow—he wanted to give me a big treat wunst, and so he brought me all the way up here already to see this beautiful Park. It's the—the first time—" but shadowy people like Wilhelmina hover always on the verge of hysteria, and her feelings choked her utterance at this point.
Millard could not bear the sight of her emotion. He said hastily, "Never mind, Miss Schulenberg; never mind. Good-morning. I hope you will enjoy your day."
Then as he and Phillida went up the stairs that lead out of the Mall at the north of the arbor by the Casino, Millard made use of his handkerchief, explaining that he must have taken a slight cold. He half halted, intending to ask Phillida to sit down with him on a seat partly screened by a bush at each end; but there were many people passing, and the two went on and mounted the steps to the circular asphalted space at the top of the knoll. Phillida, shy of what she felt must come, began to ask about the great buildings in view, and he named for her the lofty Dakota Flats rising from a rather naked plain to the westward, the low southern façade of the Art Museum to the northward, to the east the somber front of the Lenox Library,—as forbidding as the countenance of a rich collector is to him who would borrow,—and the columnar gable chimneys of the Tiffany house.
Millard now guided Phillida to a descending path on the side of the hill opposite to that by which they had come up, and which perversely turned southeastward for a while, it having been constructed on the theory that a park walk should describe the longest distance between any two points. Here he found a seat shaded by the horizontal limbs of an exotic tree and confronted by a thicket that shut out at this season almost all but little glimpses of the Tiffany house and the frowning Lenox. He asked Phillida to sit down, and he sat beside her. The momentary silence that followed was unendurable to Phillida's excited nerves, so she said:
"Mr. Millard, it was a splendid thing to do."
"What?"