"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 answered with mild brevity, and as if the young man's words had barely grazed her consciousness. A moment later she went to the window and, with her back to Lindsay, poured the contents of a small leather purse into one hand and began to count them softly. He looked up again. "I am going to pay for Stella's ticket, mother. You must not do it," he said.