"There, you see, Lily! You really must give up always trying to speak for Vonnie instead of letting her speak for herself. It's not good for _her_, and it's not good for _you_. What will you do when you're both grown up?" said Miss Cleeve humorously, "if you're at a ball, let us say, and some gentleman asks Vonnie to dance, and then you, Lily, answer instead of her and say 'Oh no, thank you very much, she's tired.' Wouldn't that make you both look very silly, don't you think?" Lily was no match for Miss Cleeve's ridicule. She could think of no confutation of this _reductio ad absurdum_ of the situation, even in her own mind. She merely hated Miss Cleeve vehemently, and put her for ever into the large class of people who "didn't understand." These were indeed legion, where was concerned the most vital preoccupation of Lily's whole being--Vonnie's welfare. When an earache pain had actually begun, which it did almost always in the evening, not the day-time--and Lily knew by the look on Vonnie's face that it was still quite endurable, there was a faint hope that if she went to bed quickly and pulled the blankets over her head, she might go to sleep before it became really bad. But Vonnie would not, and Lily dared not, utter a word of this to the authorities, and consequently the half-hour spent in the drawing-room with Father and Mother before bedtime underwent no curtailment, on such occasions. They played Happy Families, or Beggar-my-Neighbour, or listened to Father reading aloud, just as usual. And all the time Lily, in an agony, was inwardly adjuring the Being to whom she believed all her misery to be directly attributable. "Let them send us to bed _soon_--don't let her be bad to-night--oh, do make them send us to bed to-night--now at once. Let her go to sleep before it gets bad--I'll be so good if only You'll make them send us to bed at once before it gets bad----" On one such evening, when Philip Stellenthorpe saw Lily's eyes fixed upon him, and her lips moving, as he thought, in earnest attention to his reading, he paused as he was about to close the book. "What about an extra quarter of an hour, just for once?" he enquired benevolently. "It's almost too exciting to leave off here, don't you think, little Lily?" He never really quite believed that poor little Vonnie, who never spoke, could follow the thread of any story, although he would have been much shocked if anybody had ever put such a thought into words. And Lily, unforgettably, appallingly conscious of her own departure from sacred tradition, gratitude and everything else to be accounted for righteousness, said in a voice that sounded loud and strained: "Please, I'd rather we went to bed now." There was a dreadful silence. The kind smile abruptly vanished from Philip's face altogether, and he shut up the book as though he could never bear to open it again, and put it away from him almost with horror. Eleanor Stellenthorpe looked stricken.