mask callously off the grey face.

The woman had drawn near, and looked over his shoulder.

"Do you know him?" said the man.

For a moment she did not answer, and the pistol which had done its work
so well dropped noisily out of her palsied hand.

"He is a stranger to me," she said, looking fixedly at her husband's
fading face.

SAINT LUKE'S SUMMER

_IN TWO PARTS_

PART I

When the world's asleep,
I awake and weep,
Deeply sighing, say,
"Come, O break of day,
Lead my feet in my beloved's way."

MARGARET L. WOODS.

When first I knew Aunt Emmy I suppose she was about twenty-eight. I was
ten, and I thought her old, but still an agreeable companion, infinitely
pleasanter than her father and her brother, with whom she lived. She was
not my real aunt, but her father was my great-uncle, and I always called
her Aunt Emmy. Great-uncle Thomas and Uncle Tom were persons to be
avoided, stout, heavy, bullet-headed, bull-necked, throat-clearing men,
loud nose-blowers, loud soup-eaters, who reeked of tobacco when it was
my horrid duty to kiss them, and who addressed me in jocular terms when
they remembered my existence, of which I was always loth to remind them.
With these two horrors, whom she loved, Aunt Emmy lived. She was wrapped
up in them. I have actually seen her kiss Uncle Thomas when it was not
necessary, when he was asleep; and she admired Uncle Tom very much too,
though she seldom kissed him, I believe by his wish. He used to say
something about sister's kisses being like cold veal. I don't suppose he
invented that himself. He was always picking up things like that out of
a rose-coloured paper, and firing them off as his own. Uncle Tom was
tall and portly, and a wag out of office hours, with a moustache that,
in spite of all his efforts, would not turn up, but insisted on making a
melancholy inner semicircle just a size smaller than the rubicund circle
of his face. How I hated kindly, vulgar Uncle Tom! I used to pray that
he might die before the holidays. But he never did. I see now that Uncle
Tom was far, far worse than Uncle Thomas, who had had a stroke, and was
a kind of furious invalid who could not speak clearly, or eat anything
except things that were bad for him. But when I was a child, and first
began to spend my holidays in Pembridge Square, I regarded them both
with the same repulsion.

Aunt Emmy was different. I know now that she must have been a remarkably
pret