This pleading of a wife in defense of her husband touched a chord in Phillida and excited an emotion she could not define. There was that in her own heart which answered to this conjugal championship. She could have envied Mrs. Beswick her poverty with her right to defend the man she loved. She felt an increasing interest in the quiet, broad-faced, wholesome-looking woman, and she answered: "I know, Mrs. Beswick, your husband is not so much to blame. I spoke too hastily. I am a little too sensitive on that point. I don't pretend to like to be talked about and called a faith-doctor." There was an awkward pause, which the doctor broke by saying presently in a subdued voice: "In regard to your perfectly proper question, Miss Callender, I will say that the Schulenberg young woman has acute pulmonary tuberculosis." "Which means?" queried Phillida, contracting her brows. "What people call galloping consumption," said the doctor. "Now, I can't help saying, Miss Callender,"--the doctor's habitual self-contentment regained sway in his voice and manner,--"that this particular sort of consumption is one of the things that neither medicine nor faith was ever known to heal since the world was made. This young woman's lungs are full of miliary tubercles--little round bodies the size of a millet seed. The tissues are partly destroyed already. You might as well try to make an amputated leg grow on again by medicine or by prayer as to try to reconstruct her lungs by similar means. She has got to die, and I left her only some soothing medicine, and told her mother there was no use of making a doctor's bill." There was a straightforward rectitude in Dr. Beswick that inclined Phillida to forgive his bluntness of utterance and lack of manner. Here at least was no managing of a patient to get money, after the manner hinted at by Miss Bowyer. The distinction between diseases that might and those that might not be cured or mitigated by a faith-process, which Phillida detected in the doctor's words, quickened again the doubts which had begun to assail her regarding the soundness of the belief on which she had been acting, and awakened a desire to hear more. She wanted to ask him about it, but sensitiveness regarding her private affairs made her shrink. In another moment she had reflected that it would be better to hear what was to be said on this subject from a stranger than from one who knew her. The natural honesty and courage of her nature impelled her to submit further to Dr. Beswick's rather blunt knife. "You seem to think that some diseases are curable by faith and some not, Dr. Beswick," she said. "Certainly," said Beswick, tipping his chair back and drumming on the table softly with his fingers. "We use faith-cure and mind-cure in certain diseases of the nerves. Nothing could have been better for that Schulenberg girl than for you to make her believe she could walk. I should have tried that dodge myself, but in a different way, if I had been called."