e asked, carelessly.

"An accident happened to it, I am sorry to say," explained Rose. "Mr.
Allen and I were out in the grove, and somehow he jostled me, and the
candy got scattered on the ground, and he stepped on it."

"Were you and he alone out there?" asked Lucy, in a very quiet voice.

Rose looked at her amazedly. "Why, no, not when that happened!" she
replied. "Aunt Sylvia was there, too." She spoke a little
resentfully. "What if Mr. Allen and I had been alone; what is that to
her?" she thought.

"There is some more candy," said Lucy, calmly. "I will get it, and
then we will go out in the arbor. I will teach you to make the candy
any day. It is very simple. Come, Rose dear. Mother, we are going out
in the arbor."

Mrs. Ayres rose immediately. She preceded the two girls down-stairs,
and came through the sitting-room door with a dish of candy in her
hand just as they reached it. "Here is the candy, dear," she said to
Lucy, and there was something commanding in her voice.

Lucy took the dish, a pretty little decorated affair, with what
seemed to Rose an air of suspicion and a grudging "thank you, mother."

"Come, Rose," she said. She led the way and Rose followed. Mrs. Ayres
returned to the sitting-room. The girls went through the
old-fashioned garden with its flower-beds outlined with box, in which
the earlier flowers were at their prime, to the arbor. It was a
pretty old structure, covered with the shaggy arms of an old
grape-vine whose gold-green leaves were just uncurling. Lucy placed
the bowl of candy on the end of the bench which ran round the
interior, and, to Rose's surprise, seated herself at a distance from
it, and motioned Rose to sit beside her, without offering her any
candy. Lucy leaned against Rose and looked up at her. She looked
young and piteous and confiding. Rose felt again that she was sweet
and that she loved her. She put her arm around Lucy.

"You are a dear," said she.

Lucy nestled closer. "I know you must have thought me perfectly
horrid to speak as I did to mother," said she, "but you don't
understand."

Lucy hesitated. Rose waited.

"You see, the trouble is," Lucy went on, "I love mother dearly, of
course. She is the best mother that ever a girl had, but she is
always so anxious about me, and she follows me about so, and I get
nervous, and I know I don't always speak as I should. I am often
ashamed of myself. You see--"

Lucy hesitated again for a longer period. Rose waited