It was about five o'clock when Robert, under careful instructions, presented Mrs. Hilbrough's card at the Callender door. Unfortunately for Millard's plan, Mrs. Callender, despite Robert's hint that a verbal message would be sufficient, wrote her reply. When the note came into Millard's hands he did not know what to do. His commission did not extend to opening a missive addressed to Mrs. Hilbrough. The first impulse was to dispatch Robert with the note to Mrs. Hilbrough. Then Millard remembered Mr. Hilbrough's apprehension of diphtheria, and that Robert had come from the infected house. He would send Mrs. Callender's note by a messenger. But, on second thought, the note would be a more deadly missile in Hilbrough's eyes than Robert, who had not gone beyond the vestibule of the Callender house. He therefore sent a note by a messenger, stating the case, and received in return permission to open all letters addressed to Mrs. Hilbrough which his man might bring away from the Callenders'. This scheme, by which Millard personated Mrs. Hilbrough, had so much the air of a romantic intrigue of the harmless variety that it fascinated Mrs. Hilbrough, who dearly loved a manoeuver, and who would have given Millard permission to forge her name and seal his notes of inquiry with the recently discovered Hilbrough coat-of-arms, if such extreme measures had been necessary. Mrs. Callender's reply stated that Dr. Gunstone was hopeful, but that Phillida seemed pretty ill. The next morning Millard's card with "Kind inquiries" was sent in, and the reply was returned that Phillida was no worse. Her mother showed her the card, and Phillida looked at it for half a minute and then wearily put it away. An hour later Robert appeared at the door with a bunch of callas, to which Mrs. Hilbrough's card was attached. "Oh! see, Philly," said Agatha softly, "Mrs. Hilbrough has sent you some flowers." Phillida reached her hand and touched them, gazed at them a moment, and then turned her head away, and began to weep. "What is the matter, Philly? What are you crying about?" said her mother, with solicitation. "The flowers make me want to die." "Why, how can the flowers trouble you?" "They are just like what Charley used to send me. They remind me that there is nothing more for me but to die and have done with the world." The flowers were put out of her sight; but Phillida's mind had fastened itself on those other callas whose mute appeal for Charley Millard, at the crisis of her history, had so deeply moved her, though her perverse conscience would not let her respond to it. XXXVI. MRS. BESWICK.