Vonnie shook her head very slightly in obstinate negative, and the movement forced a gasping sound of pain from her.
It was always the same thing.
Vonnie would not tell about her earache when it began because she was afraid of a fuss, and she would not tell about it afterwards for fear of being scolded because she had not "said" sooner. If Lily told instead of her, then it was naughty and interfering, and very likely disbelieved besides, in the face of Vonnie's stoical denials. There was no hope anywhere, and the awful night would never, never end.
Lily sat up too, because it was impossible to lie down while Vonnie crouched there, racked with pain; and tense, angry appeals that she thought of as prayers, raced through her mind.
"Make her go to sleep—it's nothing to You to send her off to sleep—You can't let her go on like this all night.... It's cruel to punish Vonnie too, as well as me.... Why can't You send the earache to me, when it's me You want to punish?"
But God, who knew everything, would never be taken in by an argument of that sort, however plausible it might have been to the ears of human justice. Lily knew very well that God perfectly understood how, in some strange, naughty way that invariably made the authorities angry, Vonnie's sufferings hurt Lily far more acutely than her own could ever have done. And, of course, He took advantage of His knowledge whenever she had to be punished. Lily had even, sometimes, reflected with a forlorn kind of abstract justice, that this was fair enough. If He didn't so ingeniously choose the very way that hurt most, it wouldn't be a real punishment.
But, within sight and sound of Vonnie's torture to-night, she had no consideration for abstract justice.
She did what she had very seldom done before, and went to fetch the nurse.
Nurse was in bed and, to Lily's astonishment, had not yet gone to sleep.
"Did Miss Vonnie ask you to come for me?" she demanded suspiciously.