Then Vonnie wasn't unhappy, wasn't ill—would never be either again, but always happy and well! It was like a dream come true.
Lily, after the long misery of the day, felt nothing but a rush of relief and comfort at the knowledge that Vonnie was dead.
The relief which is the outcome of a violent emotional reaction, however, cannot be expected to endure.
In any case, even had Lily not awakened to a changed world, in which she hourly missed Yvonne, the inseparable companion of all her nursery days, Philip Stellenthorpe could never have rested content until the strange callousness manifested by his younger daughter had been explained away. "The want of realization of a little, sheltered child," he forbearingly called it.
But it had shocked him, all the same.
Whilst Eleanor was only blindly anxious to shield Lily from any fright or grief, where she herself considered that fright or grief might threaten, Philip was unable to refrain from exacting the due meed of conventionality that he took for a tribute to Yvonne's memory.
Yvonne's belongings disappeared mysteriously, and one day when Lily asked if she mightn't have Vonnie's paint-box now, her father, overhearing her, was gravely displeased.
"My dear child," said he, "you don't want to be a heartless little girl, do you?"
Lily did not want to be a heartless little girl at all, and still less did she want to be called one. Therefore she did not attempt to restrain showers of pitiful tears whenever she missed Vonnie most, and to cry in church whenever she saw her mother doing so.
After a time, Philip and Eleanor ceased to speak of Vonnie at all, although a great many photographs of her now pervaded the drawing-room and Eleanor's dressing-table.