‘Isabel? Ring, dear, for Murchison, and I will send a wire. She will have time to catch the midday train, and we shall have her here in good time to dress for dinner. But of course she won’t be able to see poor Uncle Henry.’
Kingston rang, feeling himself powerless to avert the coming of this discordant, pestilent alien, and Murchison was duly entrusted with the telegram. As soon as it had gone both Kingston and Gundred began to feel injured, and by common consent forbore to say another word about Isabel Darrell. Gundred felt herself aggrieved that her husband should so readily and with such apparent gladness have consented to the invasion of a stranger; Kingston felt himself aggrieved that Gundred should so gladly and with such apparent readiness have suggested the importation of a third person. Each thought the other bored with the honeymoon; neither was, but the one from offended pride, and the other from conscientious delicacy considered it a duty to make the pretence; and, each concealing his feeling strictly from the other, husband and wife drew deliberately apart to make room for the figure of Isabel Darrell between them.
The day drifted by in colourless talk, and the fine splendour of the morning grew clouded with a leaden haze. Kingston and Gundred sat out the hours in the small close garden that was shut in by the Castle. Their own little oaken wing jutted away ahead of them, but the line of the cliff, before it ran out in that unexpected spur, was enclosed by three old towers of the building, and here, in the square levelled space, looking straight over the boundless sea, with a battlemented wall of windows behind, and the Drum Tower glooming high over it in the background, had been made the only patch of garden that existed to give light and life to the grey mountain of masonry. The little flowery patch, gay with sweet-peas and roses, seemed as discordant with the Castle as a bow of ribbon on the brow of a precipice. It was frivolous, impertinent, saucy in its defiance of the stern greyness that it adorned. The only fit colours to relieve the sombre majesty of Brakelond were those of blood and fire, not those of grass and flowers. But the contradiction was so flagrant as to be fascinating, and the lovers took daily joy in this little impudent oasis.