All this while, you must understand, there was Sylvia’s “world” outside, looking on at the drama—pitying, wondering, gossiping, speculating. Frank arrested, Frank out on bail! Frank let off with a fine, because the man did not die! Frank leaving college and coming back to his plantation! Would he try to see Sylvia, and what would Sylvia do about it? Would Mandeville Castleman carry out his threat to shoot him? How was Sylvia taking it, anyway? Would she be seen at the next club-dance? And then—interest piled upon interest—Douglas van Tuiver had come! Was it true that the Yankee Crœsus wanted to marry Sylvia? Was it true that he had already asked her? Could it be that she had actually refused to see him? And what would the family do about that?—All this, you understand, most decorously, most discreetly—and yet with such thrills, such sensations! When the audience is stirred, the actors know it; and people so sensitive and proud as the Castlemans could not fail to be aware that the world’s attention was focussed upon them. So Sylvia was not left for long to indulge her grief. As soon as her relatives had made sure of her breach with Frank, they turned their energies to persuading her to present a smiling front to “society.” “You must not let people see that you are eating your heart out over a man!”—such was their cry. There were few things worse that could happen to a woman than to have it known that she was grieving about a man. Just as a savage laughs at his enemies while they are torturing him, so must a woman wear a smile upon her face while her heart was breaking. From the first moment, of course, her old suitors rallied to protect her—a kind of outer phalanx, auxiliary to the family. They wrote to her, they sent flowers, they called and lingered in the hope that she might see them. When the time for the club-dance came, the siege of the suitors became a general assault. A dozen times a day came her mother or Aunt Varina to plead with her, to scold her. “I don’t want to dance—I couldn’t dance!” she wailed; but it would be, “Here’s Charlie Peyton on the ’phone—he begs you to speak to him just a moment. Go, Sylvia, please—_don’t_ let people think you are so weak!”