midday
She could eat nothing , a fact which raised a jeering laugh from her mother and a chaffing remonstrance from her father . Billy had gone riding on Rupert and had not returned . Billy always came and went exactly as he pleased . One or two more presents from friends of her father 's had arrived by the midday post . Mrs. Bathurst unpacked them , admiring them with more than a touch of envy , assuring Dinah that she was a very lucky girl , luckier than she deserved to be ; but Dinah , though she acquiesced , had no heart for presents . She could only see -- as she had seen all through the night -- the piteous , marred face of a woman who had passed through such an intensity of suffering as she could only dimly guess at into the dark of utter despair . She could only hear , whichever way she turned , the clanking of the chains that in so brief a time were to be welded irrevocably about herself .