hing of you then."

Dinah had no answer. She could not convince him that her spirit had been
broken for such encounters long ago. Billy had never been tied up to a
bed-post and whipped till limp with exhaustion, but such treatment had
been her portion more times than she could number.

But every hour brought her deliverance nearer, and so far she had managed
to avoid physical violence though the dread of it always menaced her.

"Why does she hate me so?" Over and over again she asked herself the
question, but she never found any answer thereto; and she was fain to
believe her father's easy-going verdict: "There's no accounting for your
mother's tantrums; they've got to be visited on somebody."

She wondered what would happen when she was no longer at hand to act as
scapegoat, and yet it seemed to her that her mother longed to be rid of
her.

"I'll get things into good order when you're out of the way," she said
to her on the last evening but one before the wedding-day, the evening
on which the Studleys were to arrive at the Court. "You're just a born
muddler, and you'll never be anything else, Lady Studley or no Lady
Studley. Get along upstairs and dress yourself for your precious
dinner-party, or your father will be ready first! Oh, it'll be a good
thing when it's all over and done with, but if you think you'll ever get
treated as a grand lady here, you're very much mistaken. Home broth is
all you'll ever get from me, so you needn't expect anything different.
If you don't like it, you can stop away."

Dinah escaped from the rating tongue as swiftly as she dared. She knew
that her mother had been asked to dine at the Court also--for the first
time in her life--and had tersely refused. She wasn't going to be
condescended to by anybody, she had told her husband in Dinah's hearing,
and he had merely shrugged his shoulders and advised her to please
herself.

Billy had not been asked, somewhat to his disgust; but he looked forward
to seeing Scott again in the morning and ordered Dinah to ask him to
lunch with them.

So finally Dinah and her father set forth alone in one of the motors from
the Court to attend the gathering of County magnates that the de Vignes
had summoned in honour of Sir Eustace Studley and his chosen bride.

She wore one of her trousseau gowns for the occasion, a pale green
gossamer-like garment that made her look more nymph-like than ever. Her
mother had surveyed it with narrowed eyes and a bitt