She strongly suspected that her step-mother was in league with him, though she had no direct proof of this.  Preston was being constantly asked to the house, and whenever they went out to dine they almost invariably met him.  She had begun to have a feeling that people eyed them covertly, with significant glances, that they were thrown together by design.  Wherever they met, he always fell to her lot as dinner-partner, and he had begun to affect an attitude of proprietorship towards her which was yet too indefinite for her actively to resent,

She felt as if a net were closing around her from which, despite her utmost effort, she was powerless to escape.  Also, for weeks now she had received no letter from Guy, and that fact disheartened her more than any other.  She had never before had to wait so long for word from him.  Very brief, often unsatisfying, as his letters had been, at least they had never failed to arrive.  And she counted upon them so.  Without them, she felt bereft of her mainstay.  Without them, the almost daily, nerve-shattering scenes which her step-mother somehow managed to enact, however discreet her attitude, became an infliction hardly to be borne.  She might have left her home for a visit among friends, but something held her back from this.  Something warned her that if she went her place would be instantly filled up, and she would never return.  And very bitterly she realized the fact that for the next two years she was dependent.  She had not been trained to earn her own living, and she lacked the means to obtain a training.  Her father, she knew, would not hear of such a thing, nor would he relinquish the only means he possessed of controlling her actions.  She believed that privately he did not wish to part with her, though her presence was a very obvious drawback to his comfort.  He never took her part, but also he never threw his weight into the balance against her.  He merely, with considerable surliness, looked on.

And so the cruel struggle went on till it seemed to Sylvia that her physical strength was ultimately beginning to fail.  She came to dread her step-mother’s presence with a feeling akin to nausea, to shrink in every nerve from the constant ordeals so ruthlessly thrust upon her,

So far she had never faltered or shown any sign of weakness under the long-drawn-out persecution, but she was becoming aware that, strive as she might, her endurance had its limits.  She was but human, and she was intensely sensitive to unkindness.  Her nerves were beginning to give way under the strain.  There were even times when she felt a breakdown to be inevitable, and only the thought of her step-mother’s triumph warded it off.  Once down, and she knew she would be a slave, broken beyond redemption to the most pitiless tyranny.  And so, though her strength was worn threadbare through perpetual strain, she clung to it still.  If only—­oh, if only—­Guy would write!  If he should be ill—­if he should fail her—­she felt that it would be the end of everything.  For nothing else mattered.