"It is Mr. Millard, isn't it?" he heard some one say, and, turning, he saw before him Wilhelmina Schulenberg, not now seated helpless in the chair he had given her, but hanging on the arm of her faithful Rudolph.
"How do you do, Miss Schulenberg?" said Millard, examining her with curiosity.
"You see I am able to walk wunst again," she said. "It is to Miss Callender and her prayers that I owe it already."
"But you are not quite strong," said Millard. "Do you get better?"
"Not so much now. It is my faith is weak. If I only could believe already, it would all to me be possible, Mr. Millard. But it is something to walk on my feet, isn't it, Mr. Millard?"
"Indeed it is, Miss Schulenberg. It must make your good brother glad."
Rudolph received this polite indirect compliment a little foolishly, but appreciation from a fine gentleman did him good, and after Charley had gone he was profuse in his praises of "Miss Callender's man," as he called him.
XX.
DIVISIONS.
Millard went no farther through the square, but turned toward Tenth street, and through that to Second Avenue, and so uptownward. But how should he argue with Phillida? He had seen an indisputable example of the virtue of her prayers. Though he could not believe in the miraculous character of the cure, how should he explain it? That Wilhelmina had been shamming was incredible, that her ailments were not imaginary was proven by the fact of her recovery being but partial. To deny the abstract possibility of such a cure seemed illogical from his own standpoint. Even the tepid rector of St. Matthias had occasionally homilized in a vague way about the efficacy of faith and the power of prayer, but the rector seemed to think that this potency was for the most part a matter of ancient history, for his illustrations were rarely drawn from anything more modern than the lives of the Church fathers, and of the female relatives of the Church fathers, such as Saint Monica. Millard could not see any ground on which he could deny the reality of the miracle in the Schulenberg case, but his common sense was that of a man of worldly experience, a common sense which stubbornly refuses to believe the phenomenal or extraordinary, even when unable to formulate a single reason for incredulity.