eekly, said good-night to Hannah and
went up-stairs.

She could not go to sleep, although she went at once to bed, and
extinguished her lamp. She lay there and heard a clock down in the
hall strike the hours. The clock had struck twelve, and she had not
heard Dr. Ellridge go. The whole situation filled her with a sort of
wonder of disgust. She could not imagine her mother and Dr. Ellridge
sitting up until midnight as she might sit up with George Ramsey. She
felt as if she were witnessing a ghastly inversion of things, as if
Love, instead of being in his proper panoply of wings and roses, was
invested with a medicine-case, an obsolete frock-coat, and elderly
obesity. Dr. Ellridge was quite stout. She wondered how her mother
could, and then she wondered how Dr. Ellridge could. Lily loved her
mother, but she had relegated her to what she considered her proper
place in the scheme of things, and now she was overstepping it. Lily
called to mind vividly the lines on her mother's face, her matronly
figure. It seemed to her that her mother had had her time of love
with her father, and this was as abnormal as two springs in one year.
Shortly after twelve, Lily heard a soft murmur of voices in the hall,
then the front door close. Then her mother came up-stairs and entered
her room.

"Are you asleep, Lily?" she whispered, softly, and Lily recognized
with shame the artificiality of the whisper.

"No, mother, I am not asleep," she replied, quite loudly.

Her mother came and sat down on the bed beside her. She patted Lily's
cheeks, and felt for her hand. Lily's impulse was to snatch it away,
but she was too gentle. She let it remain passively in her mother's
nervous clasp.

"Lily, my dear child, I have something to tell you," whispered Mrs.
Merrill.

Lily said nothing.

"Lily, my precious child," said her mother, in her strained whisper.
"I don't know whether you have suspected anything or not, but I am
meditating a great change in my life. I have been very lonely since
your dear father died, and I never had a nature to live alone and be
happy. You might as well expect the vine to live without its tree. I
have made up my mind that I shall be much happier, and Dr. Ellridge
will. He needs the sympathy and love of a wife. His daughters do as
well as they can, but a daughter is not like a wife."

"Oh, mother!" said Lily. Then she gave a little sob. Her mother bent
over and kissed her, and Lily smelled Dr. Ellridge's cigar, and