parable, when those who “had borne the burden and heat of the day” received but the same wage as those that had worked but one hour.  “It was not just”, she would say doggedly.  A sad life was hers, for she repelled all sympathy, and yet later I had reason to believe that she half broke her heart because none loved her well.  She was ever gloomy, unsympathising, carping, but she worked herself to death for those whose love she chillily repulsed.  She worked till, denying herself every comfort, she literally dropped.  One morning, when she got out of bed, she fell, and crawling into bed again, quietly said she could do no more; lay there for some months, suffering horribly with unvarying patience; and died, rejoicing that at last she would have “rest”.

Two other “Aunties” were my playfellows, and I their pet.  Minnie, a brilliant pianiste, earned a precarious livelihood by teaching music.  The long fasts, the facing of all weathers, the weary rides in omnibuses with soaked feet, broke down at last a splendid constitution, and after some three years of torture, commencing with a sharp attack of English cholera, she died the year before my marriage.  But during my girlhood she was the gayest and merriest of my friends, her natural buoyancy re-asserting itself whenever she could escape from her musical tread-mill.  Great was my delight when she joined my mother and myself for our spring or summer trips, and when at my favorite St. Leonards—­at the far unfashionable end, right away from the gay watering-place folk—­we settled down for four or five happy weeks of sea and country, and when Minnie and I scampered over the country on horseback, merry as children set free from school.  My other favorite auntie was of a quieter type, a soft pretty loving little woman.  “Co” we called her, for she was “such a cosy little thing”, her father used to say.  She was my mother’s favorite sister, her “child”, she would name her, because “Co” was so much her junior, and when she was a young girl the little child had been her charge.  “Always take care of little Co”, was one of my mother’s dying charges to me, and fortunately “little Co” has—­though the only one of my relatives who has done so—­clung to me through change of faith, and through social ostracism.  Her love for me, and her full belief that, however she differed from me, I meant right, have never varied, have never been shaken.  She is intensely religious—­as will be seen in the later story, wherein her life was much woven with mine—­but however much “darling Annie’s” views or actions might shock her, it is “darling Annie” through it all; “You are so good” she said to me the last time I saw her, looking up at me with all her heart in her eyes; “anyone so good as you must come to our dear Lord at last!” As though any, save a brute, could be aught but good to “little Co”.