“My pretty pet,” said the admiral, drawing her to him and stroking her head as if she had been a kitten, “then you sha'n't sing!”
“If you should lie down for half an hour, dearest,” I said, “do you think that would rest you, and you might be able to give us just one song?”
I was anxious that Simpson should hear her. He sang a very good song himself, and his heart seemed set on it.
“Perhaps,” she said, brightening up. “I'll try, at any rate.”
I gave her my arm, and we went up-stairs together to her room.
“Don't come in, or else we'll begin to talk, and that will wake me up,” she said, seeing me about to enter; “and I'm so dead with sleep I'm sure I shall be off in five minutes, if you leave me.”
I did as she wished, and returned to the drawing-room, where I found my step-mother in conclave with the three men on more practical matters than songs and sirens.
Simpson had been summoned for the sole purpose of discussing and settling what ought in the proper course of things to have been discussed and settled before my marriage, and Sir Simon Harness was just as anxious as Mrs. de Winton that everything should be made straight and clear with regard to Isabel's fortune and my due control over it. The admiral alone was indifferent about it, and exhibited a sailor-like contempt for the whole affair—in fact, intimated that it was out of all sense and reason and morality that I should have got a penny of fortune with such a wife.
“I call it immoral, sir,” he declared, scowling at me from under his bushy eyebrows; “you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“And so I am, my dear uncle,” I replied hastily. “And that's just why I hate having the subject attacked in this precipitate way, as if I wanted to grab up her money the moment I could lay my hands upon it.”