‘What, Horace?’ she said, trying to laugh.
‘The things we do for them,’ he said. ‘You are a kind of demons with your pretty faces. You tempt us to do a thousand things that if we had our wits about us——’
‘Horace, we have surely something more than pretty faces? Is that all you care for?’ said Isabel.
‘Well, never mind,’ he said, coarsely; ‘if you were plain, you would not ask such a question; but if you had been plain, Isabel, you should never have been my wife.’
He expected her to be pleased with the rough compliment: and, pleased himself, roused up a little out of the shadow, and suffered his face to relax and looked at her as at a picture. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you should never have been my wife. I never thought, even when I admired you most in the old times, that you would have turned out so handsome, Isabel; and when I look at you I don’t mind——’
‘What is it you don’t mind?’
‘All you have cost me,’ he said, falling back into the shadow. ‘By Heaven that night at the opera, when I saw you dazzling—you whom I had been persuading myself to believe was only a pretty country girl. And there you were like a queen of beauty. I shall never forget how I felt that night.’
‘Oh, don’t speak of it!’ she cried. ‘I cannot bear it; don’t remind me of that.’
‘If I could bear it, you may,’ he said, with a certain tone of contempt; ‘but I don’t mind, you are worth it all, my dear; and now let us have some dinner. I have got you in spite of everything, and at least we may be jolly to-night.’
So they sat down to their dinner, which Stapylton himself had taken the trouble to order; and not a word was said about the child. He had accepted it as a natural part of their household, she thought; and Isabel’s heart grew a little lighter with every word he spoke. He had forgotten, no doubt, all that had been said in a different mood; and she began to flatter herself it had been but a passing moment of ill-temper; and that now the child was under his roof, there would be no further comment upon it. A feverish gaiety took possession of her as she caught at this thought. She made a conscious effort to amuse him, stirring up all her dormant powers. She told him of her meeting with Ailie, and did not wince at his rude comments upon the woman he had no understanding of. She was so anxious to please him that she could have borne anything he chose to say. She was lowering to his level, though she did not know it; a certain pleasure in the fact of being able to make him laugh, and turn his thoughts from more serious matters, took possession of her. Oh, if she could only have gone on telling him stories like Scherazade, and occupying him with any romance or trifle till they had embarked on their voyage, and little Margaret under her shawl had been conveyed into the ship unnoticed! It was the first piece of practical falsehood she had ever attempted, and it had been successful beyond her hopes; and in the haste and agitation of the moment it seemed to her that this was the soundest policy, and that there was no other course before her to pursue.