The Lily of ten and eleven years old had dutifully pretended amusement, and thought herself naughty for the inward pang that she experienced at being treated like a baby.
A year later, she was far more openly rebellious.
"It's so very dull doing lessons all alone, Father."
"If God had spared us our poor little Yvonne, you would not have to do them alone," said Philip, the allusion, in some mysterious way, having exactly the effect of a merited rebuke.
Lily immediately, and quite irrationally, felt that she had been heartless.
"Besides," continued her father, pressing the advantage that he perceived himself to have gained, although without quite knowing how, "you don't want to break up our poor little home-party any further, my child, do you? You and I and poor little Kenneth are all that are left now, you know."
Lily was silenced, although, dimly, she knew that she had been unfairly defeated. What he said was true—she cried herself to sleep at the thought of it sometimes—but her powers of clear thinking had been too thoroughly obscured for her to analyze the illogical attitude taken up by her father, who from time to time said, with the most obvious sincerity:
"Poor little children! How can I do anything for them? She made home, and now that she and little Yvonne are gone, there is nothing left but sadness and emptiness. I have no wish whatever to live, but it must be as God Almighty wills."
"It couldn't make any difference to him if I went to school," Lily reflected resentfully, after Philip had thus once more put in words the utter despondency that hung always over him.
By the time that Lily was fourteen, there was scarcely anything left of the pride and the species of doting affection that her father had displayed during her early childhood. His ideal of a happy home had been rudely shattered by Eleanor's death, and he attributed the signs of Lily's inevitable development to a lack of veneration for her mother's memory. He was honestly incapable of perceiving that, if Eleanor had lived, conflict of the most irreconcilable kind must have arisen between her and Lily.