Rosamond knew that the inevitable moment was come. “I ordered Trumbull not to inquire further,” she said, with a careful calmness which was evidently defensive.
Lydgate stared at her in mute amazement. Only half an hour before he had been fastening up her plaits for her, and talking the “little language” of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning it, accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then miraculously dimpling towards her votary. With such fibres still astir in him, the shock he received could not at once be distinctly anger; it was confused pain. He laid down the knife and fork with which he was carving, and throwing himself back in his chair, said at last, with a cool irony in his tone—
“May I ask when and why you did so?”
“When I knew that the Plymdales had taken a house, I called to tell him not to mention ours to them; and at the same time I told him not to let the affair go on any further. I knew that it would be very injurious to you if it were known that you wished to part with your house and furniture, and I had a very strong objection to it. I think that was reason enough.”
“It was of no consequence then that I had told you imperative reasons of another kind; of no consequence that I had come to a different conclusion, and given an order accordingly?” said Lydgate, bitingly, the thunder and lightning gathering about his brow and eyes.
The effect of anyone’s anger on Rosamond had always been to make her shrink in cold dislike, and to become all the more calmly correct, in the conviction that she was not the person to misbehave whatever others might do. She replied—
“I think I had a perfect right to speak on a subject which concerns me at least as much as you.”