to join a cousin farming in South Africa on the understanding that if he made a success of it he might eventually return and ask Sylvia to be his wife.  There was to be no engagement between them, and if she elected to marry in the meantime so much the better, in the squire’s opinion.  He had had little doubt that Sylvia would marry when she had had time to forget some of the poignancy of first love.  But in this he had been mistaken.  Sylvia had steadfastly refused every lover who had come her way.

He had found another billet for old Ranger, and had installed a dour Scotchman in his place.  But Sylvia still corresponded with young Guy, still spoke of him as the man she meant to marry.  It was true she did not often speak of him, but that might have been through lack of sympathetic listeners.  There was, moreover, about her an innate reserve which held her back where her deepest feelings were concerned.  But her father knew, and she meant him to know, that neither time nor distance had eradicated the image of the man she loved from her heart.  The days on which his letters reached her were always marked with a secret gladness, albeit the letters themselves held sometimes little more than affectionate commentary upon her own.

That Guy was making his way and that he would eventually return to her were practical certainties in her young mind.  If his letters contained little to support this belief, she yet never questioned it for a moment.  Guy was the sort to get on.  She was sure of it.  And he was worth waiting for.  Oh, she could afford to be patient for Guy.  She did not, moreover, believe that her father would hold out for ever.  Also, and secretly this thought buoyed her up in rare moments of depression, in another two years—­when she was twenty-five—­she would inherit some money from her mother.  It was not a very large sum, but it would be enough to render her independent.  It would very greatly increase her liberty of action.  She had little doubt that the very fact of it would help to overcome her father’s prejudices and very considerably modify his attitude.

So, in a fashion, she had during the past three years come to regard her twenty-fifth birthday as a milestone in her life.  She would be patient till it came, but then—­at last—­if circumstances permitted, she would take her fate into her own hands, She would—­at last—­assume the direction of her own life.

So she had planned, but so it was not to be.  Her fate had already begun to shape itself in a fashion that was little to her liking.  Travelling with her father in the North earlier in the summer, she had met with a slight accident which had compelled her to make the acquaintance of a lady staying at the same hotel whom she had disliked at the outset and always sought to avoid.  This lady, Mrs. Emmott, was a widow with no settled home.  Profiting by circumstances she had attached herself to Sylvia and her father, and now she was the latter’s wife.