ut I mean going about as I do, as
I did to-day to the Poor Farm. It seems so perfunctory.

"Don't misunderstand me, Miss Leeds," and Mrs. Custer laid a hand on
Clara's arm. "There is no reason why you should care what Mr. Custer and
I think about your--about our--all our very great loss. But I felt that
it must be some comfort for you to know that we, my husband and I, who
might seem indifferent--not that--say unaffected by what has
happened,--feel it very, very deeply; and to know that his life, which I
can't conceive of as finished, has left a deep, deep print on ours."

The phaeton was rolling through frequented streets. It turned a corner
as Mrs. Custer ceased speaking.

"I--I must get out here," said Clara Leeds. "You needn't drive me. It is
only a block to walk."

"Miss Leeds, forgive me--" Mrs. Custer's lips trembled with compassion.

"Oh, there isn't anything--it isn't that--good night." Clara backed down
to the street and hurried off through the dusk. And as she went tears
dropped slowly to her cheeks--cold, wretched tears.

His Sister

BY MARY APPLEWHITE BACON

"But you couldn't see me leave, mother, anyway, unless I was there to
go."

It was characteristic of the girl adjusting her new travelling-hat
before the dim little looking-glass that, while her heart was beating
with excitement which was strangely like grief, she could give herself
at once to her stepmother's inquietude and turn it aside with a jest.

Mrs. Morgan, arrested in her anxious movement towards the door, stood
for a moment taking in the reasonableness of Stella's proposition, and
then sank back to the edge of her chair. "The train gets here at two
o'clock," she argued.

Lindsay Cowart came into the room, his head bent over the satchel he had
been mending. "You had better say good-by to Stella here at the house,
mother," he suggested; "there's no use for you to walk down to the depot
in the hot sun." And then he noticed that his stepmother had on her
bonnet with the veil to it--she had married since his father's death and
was again a widow,--and, in extreme disregard of the September heat, was
dressed in the black worsted of a diagonal weave which she wore only on
occasions which demanded some special tribute to their importance.

She began smoothing out on her knees the black gloves which, in her
nervous haste to be going, she had been holding squeezed in a tight ball
in her left hand. "I can get there, I reckon," she an