“Stand round here by the light,” said her mother, calmly.  Lucy obeyed.  She stood, although her shoulders twitched nervously, while her mother unfastened her gown.  Then she began almost tearing off her other garments.  “Lucy,” said Mrs. Ayres, “you are over twenty years old, and a woman grown, but you are not as strong as I am, and I used to take you over my knee and spank you when you were a child and didn’t behave, and I’ll do it now if you are not careful.  You unfasten that corset-cover properly.  You are tearing the lace.”

Lucy gazed at her mother a moment in a frenzy of rage, then suddenly her face began to work piteously.  She flung herself face downward upon her bed, and sobbed long, hysterical sobs.  Then Mrs. Ayres waxed tender.  She bent over the girl, and gently untied ribbons and unfastened buttons, and slipped a night-gown over her head.  Then she rolled her over in the bed, as if she had been a baby, and laid her own cheek against the hot, throbbing one of the girl.  “Mother’s lamb,” she said, softly.  “There, there, dear, mother knows all about it.”

“You don’t,” gasped the girl.  “What do you know?  You—­you were married when you were years younger than I am.”  There was something violently accusing in her tone.  She thrust her mother away and sat up in bed, and looked at her with fierce eyes blazing like lamps in her soft, flushed face.

“I know it,” said Mrs. Ayres.  “I know it, and I know what you mean, Lucy; but there is something else which I know and you do not.”

“I’d like to know what!”

“How a mother reads the heart of her child.”

Lucy stared at her mother.  Her face softened.  Then it grew burning red and angrier.  “You taunt me with that,” she said, in a whisper—­“with that and everything.”  She buried her face in her crushed pillow again and burst into long wails.

Mrs. Ayres smoothed her hair.  “Lucy,” said she, “listen.  I know what is going on within you as you don’t know it yourself.  I know the agony of it as you don’t know it yourself.”

“I’d like to know how.”

“Because you are my child; because I can hardly sleep for thinking of you; because every one of my waking moments is filled with you.  Lucy, because I am your mother and you are yourself.  I am not taunting you.  I understand.”

“You can’t.”

“I do.  I know just how you felt about that young man from the city who boarded at the hotel six years ago.  I know how you felt about Tom Merrill, who called here a few times, and then stopped, and married a girl from Boston.  I have known exactly how you have felt about all the others, and—­I know about this last.”  Her voice sank to a whisper.

“I have had some reason,” Lucy said, with a terrible eagerness of self-defence.  “I have, mother.”

“What?”

“One day, the first year he came, I was standing at the gate beside that flowering-almond bush, and it was all in flower, and he came past and he looked at the bush and at me, then at the bush again, and he said, ‘How beautiful that is!’ But, mother, he meant me.”