"I expect I'm too sensitive," Sylvia said to herself. "I expect I really am common, because apparently common people are always looking out for slights. I don't look out for them now, but if I were to tell Phyllis all about myself, I'm sure I should begin to look out for them. No, I'll just be friends with her up to a point, for so long as I stay at Hornton House; then we'll separate forever. I'm really an absolute fraud. I'm just as much of a fraud now as when I was dressed up as a boy. I'm not real in this life. I haven't been real since I came down to breakfast with Miss Ashley that first morning. I'm simply a very good impostor. I must inherit the talent from father. Another reason against telling Phyllis about myself is that, if I do, I shall become her property. Miss Ashley knows all about me, but I'm not her property, because it's part of her profession to be told secrets. Phyllis would love me more than ever, so long as she was the only person that owned the secret, but if anybody else ever knew, even if it were only Philip, she would be jealous and she would have to make a secret of it with some one else. Then she would be ashamed of herself and would begin to hate and despise me in self-defense. No, I must never tell any of the girls." Apart from these morbid fits, which were not very frequent, Sylvia enjoyed her stay at Markham Grange. In a way it encouraged the idea of marrying Philip; for the country life appealed to her not as to a cockney by the strangeness of its inhabitants and the mere quantity of grass in sight, but more deeply with those old ineffable longings of Hampstead. At the end of the summer term the twins invited Sylvia to stay with them in Hertfordshire. She refused at first, because she felt that she could not bear the idea of being jealously disturbed by a second home. The twins were inconsolable at her refusal and sent a telegram to their mother, who had already written one charming letter of invitation, and who now wrote another in which she told Sylvia of her children's bitter disappointment and begged her to come. Miss Ashley, also, was anxious that Sylvia should go, and told her frankly that it seemed an excellent chance to think over seriously her marriage with Philip in the autumn. Philip, now that the date of her final decision was drawing near, wished her to remain with Miss Ashley in London. His opposition was enough to make Sylvia insist upon going; so, when at the end of July the school was swept by a tornado of relations and friends, Sylvia was swept away with the twins to Hertfordshire, and Philip was left to wait till the end of September to know whether she would marry him or not in October.