“And Admiral de Winton—of course you mean to ask him down?”
“Is that another trustee?” asked Isabel.
“Not exactly, though he often acted with Sir Simon in my affairs, being next of kin,” I said. “He was my father's executor.”
“Executor! Why, that's worse than a trustee! I won't have him come here, Clide! You're going to fill the house with horrid old men who will worry me to death. I know they will. But I won't submit to it!”
She pushed away her cup with a sudden gesture that made the china rattle, and, flushing up scarlet, walked away from the table, and flung herself into a chair near the fire. If she had flung the tea-pot at my head, I could not have been more taken aback. It was impossible to deny that the burst of temper was very becoming to her complexion, but ... I was conscious of a very distinct sense of disappointment. Yes, disappointment; there was no other word for it. As to my step-mother, she looked from me to my wife, and from my wife to me. Isabel, meantime, sat trembling and excited, her eyes sparkling, her face glowing like an angry rose.
“Dearest....” I began, “really....”
“Oh! don't,” she shrieked, and burst into a torrent of tears.
Mrs. de Winton, prompted either by delicacy or by disgust, got up and left the room, leaving me to conjure as best I could the storm that had suddenly broken out in my conjugal paradise. I was utterly at a loss to understand Isabel. She said she was inconsolable at having vexed me, but to all my entreaties and arguments would answer nothing except that she was frightened at strangers, and above all at horrid old men; and that if I loved her, I was not to introduce her to anybody, but to let us live all our lives alone in the dear old Moat. She wanted no society but mine, and surely, if I loved her, I ought not to want any but hers! This was irresistible logic to my heart; but my reason, being less infatuated, perversely refused to abide by it. There was no use at this crisis in broaching prudential arrangements as an excuse for inviting down my two friends. Such an insinuation would only have added fuel to the fire. Yet the new aspect in which my heiress-wife was revealing herself made it clear that some such measures as my step-mother had suggested were absolutely necessary to protect Isabel against her own folly and deplorable ignorance of life.
The storm of sobs and tears subsided by degrees. Isabel declared she was ready to make any sacrifice of her own feelings to mine; that if I liked to invite all the trustees in Lincoln's Inn and Chancery Lane down to the Moat, she would do her best to receive them properly, so that I should not be ashamed of my wife; but of course there was an end to her happiness. Arcadia was gone. All her dreams of romantic bliss had vanished into thin air. She was after all to be nothing more than a humdrum wife with a house to look after and guests to entertain.