"I had better turn myself out instead, perhaps."
The combing of my hair suddenly stopped, and at the next moment I heard Price saying in a voice which seemed to come from a long way off:
"Goodness gracious me! Is it like that, my lady?"
SEVENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
Alma was as good as her word.
She did everything without consulting me—fixed the date of the reception for a month after the day of my father's visit, and sent out invitations to all "the insular gentry" included in the lists which came from Nessy MacLeod in her stiff and formal handwriting.
These lists came morning after morning, until the invitations issued reached the grand total of five hundred.
As the rooms of the Castle were not large enough to accommodate so many guests, Alma proposed to erect a temporary pavilion. My father agreed, and within a week hundreds of workmen from Blackwater were setting up a vast wooden structure, in the form of the Colosseum, on the headlands beyond the garden where Martin and I had walked together.
While the work went on my father's feverish pride seemed to increase. I heard of messages to Alma saying that no money was to be spared. The reception was to surpass in grandeur any fête ever held in Ellan. Not knowing what high stakes my father was playing for, I was frightened by this extravagance, and from that cause alone I wished to escape from the sight of it.