And the fact was that Isabel was thoroughly pleased with her old man, and enjoyed her expedition with all her heart. The Marquis asked his old tutor to dinner, and gave Isabel his arm, and placed her by his side with much admiration of her sweet looks. ‘I used to know your father,’ he told her, ‘when I was a lad. What an eye he had! and would tire us all out shooting over the Kilcranion moors.’ This acknowledgment of Captain Duncan as himself in some way received by the local deities, was balm to Isabel’s soul, and opened her shy intelligence to the Marquis, who found her little sayings as piquant as sayings usually are which fall from pretty lips. And the Marchioness offered Mrs. Lothian her box at the Opera to Isabel’s great confusion and perplexity. The young ladies of the house clustered round her, telling her what the music was to be, and how she would enjoy it, and how much they envied her her first opera. ‘You will think you are in Heaven,’ cried one enthusiastic girl. When she left the grand house in Park Lane, with this ecstatic prospect before her, Isabel felt that her life, as the stepmother had said, was indeed like a fairy-tale. ‘But is it so nice as they say?’ she asked her husband, as they went home. ‘To them it is,’ said that man of universal information, ‘for they have been brought up to it. I am not so sure about you; but you must ask me no more questions, for I want you to judge of it for yourself.’ And it was with a sense of responsibility that Isabel set out for this new felicity. She had put on one of her wedding-dresses, the blue one which her husband loved--and had white flowers in her pretty brown hair. Her sense of her present judicial position took from her the pretty girlish excitement into which she had fallen about all the novelties that surrounded her, and restored that soft dignity of the old man’s wife, the look of age she had tried to put on when she first realised Mrs. Lothian’s responsibility. She looked, perhaps, rather more girlish in this state of importance and seriousness than she did in her livelier mood. And there was another reason, too, for unusual dignity. Lady Mary was to go with her under her charge. ‘And I trust to you, Mrs. Lothian, to take care of her,’ the Marchioness had said, with a sense of the joke which was far from being shared by Isabel. It was the first time she had ever acted as chaperone, and her mind was disturbed by the awful question what she should do if anyone approached the young lady who was under her charge. ‘Is she not to speak to anyone?--and am I to keep everybody away?’ she asked her husband, and if possible admired Mr. Lothian’s knowledge more than ever when he instructed her in her easy duties. As for Lady Mary herself, she was quite excited by the prospect of witnessing Isabel’s delight. ‘Oh I wish I were you!’ she cried, ‘I am _blasée_, you know. I know them all off by heart, and exactly how they will look, and how Grisi will bring out her notes.