“We will hope not,” agreed the Colonel.  “But all the same, I rather think that her mother will find her considerably less tame and tractable when she sees her again than she has ever been before.  Liberty, you know, is a dangerous joy for the young.”

“Then we must be more strict with her ourselves,” said Lady Grace.

CHAPTER X

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

Dinah ran swiftly down the corridor to her own room.

As a matter of fact, she had intruded upon the Colonel and Lady Grace in the secret hope of finding a propitious moment for once again pressing her request to be allowed to accept Scott’s invitation to tea.  Her failure to do so added fuel to the flame, arousing in her an almost irresistible impulse to rebel openly.

The fear of consequences alone restrained her, for to be escorted home in disgrace after only a week in this Alpine paradise was more than she could face.  All her life the dread of her mother’s wrath had overhung Dinah like a cloud, sometimes near, sometimes distant, but always present.  She had been brought up to fear her from her cradle.  All through her childhood her punishments had been bitterly severe.  She winced still at the bare thought of them; and she was as fully convinced as was Lady Grace that her mother had never really loved her.  To come under the ban of her displeasure meant days of harsh treatment, nor, now that her childhood was over, had the discipline been relaxed.  She never attempted to rebel openly.  Her fear of her mother had become an integral part of herself.  Her spirit shrank before her fits of violence.  But for her father and Billy she sometimes thought that home would be an impossible place.

But her affection for her father was of a very intense order.  Lazy, self-indulgent, supremely easy-going, yet possessed of a fascination that had held her from babyhood, such was Guy Bathurst.  Despised at least outwardly by his wife and adored by his daughter, he went his indifferent way, enjoying life as he found it and quite impervious to snubs.

“I never interfere with your mother,” was a very frequent sentence on his lips, and by that axiom he ruled his life, looking negligently on while Dinah was bent without mercy to the wheel of tyranny.

He was fond of Dinah,—­her devotion to him made that inevitable—­but he never obtruded his fondness to the point of interference on her behalf; for both of them were secretly aware that the harshness meted out to her had much of its being in a deep, unreasoning jealousy of that very selfish fondness.  They kept their affection as it were for strictly private consumption, and it was that alone that made life at home tolerable to Dinah.

For upon one point her father was insistent.  He would not part with her unless she married.  He did not object to her working at home for his comfort, but the idea of her working elsewhere and making her living was one which he refused to consider.  With rare self-assertion, he would not hear of it, and when he really asserted himself, which was seldom, his wife was wont to yield, albeit ungraciously enough, to his behest.