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.