“Said you had better go to bed?” said she.  “Why, it isn’t nine o’clock!”

“He said I looked tired, Hannah,” said Lily faintly.

Hannah, who was a large, high-shouldered Nova Scotia girl, with a large, flat face obscured with freckles, sniffed.  Lily heard her say quite distinctly as she went into the pantry for the milk, that she called it a shame when there were so many grown-up daughters to think of, for her part.

Lily knew what she meant.  She sat quite pale and still while the milk was heating, and then drank it meekly, 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 she thought also medicine.  She shrank away from her mother, and sobbed convulsively.