Dinah could not feel that her mother’s attitude towards herself had materially altered.  It was sullen and threatening at times, almost as if she resented her daughter’s good fortune, and she lived in continual dread of an outbreak of the cruel temper that had so embittered her home life.  But Billy’s presence made a difference even to that.  His influence was entirely wholesome, and he feared no one.

“Why don’t you stand up to her?” he said to his sister on one occasion when he found her weeping after an overwhelming brow-beating over some failure in the kitchen.  “She’d think something 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 bitter sneer.