Guilt, and a ludicrously disproportionate terror showed plainly in her face when she once met her father, on her return by the least frequented entrance to the house.
"What have you been doing, my little pet?" Philip enquired with a suspiciousness foreign to his nature, but which must have been engendered in the most trusting of parents by Lily's confused and disconcerted expression.
"I just went up to the village," she stammered, and felt herself flushing.
Philip stared at her in a puzzled manner. "What for?" he said at last.
"Nothing, Father. Just a—a walk."
Lily hastened away from further questions with the sense of her own degradation strong upon her. She hated herself for having told a lie, and supposed that she had done so from a natural and ingrained tendency to deceive in the first place, and an uncontrollable and dishonouring passion for sweets in the second. She had become incapable of analyzing impartially the true grounds of her own moral cowardice.
Had her natural honesty of mind been less systematically and thoroughly warped, she might have received illumination from the sequel of the affair.
Philip, during the afternoon that followed their encounter, was silent with that peculiar silence which Lily knew, too well, denoted in him both grief and perplexity.
Then, at the end of the evening, he said to her suddenly:
"My little child would never do anything foolish without telling me, eh, Lily?"