There was but one way of definitely answering that question.  Stella boldly described her mother’s idea of a wedding—­including the Archbishop, the twelve bridesmaids in green and gold, and the hundred guests at breakfast in Lord Loring’s picture gallery.  Romayne’s consternation literally deprived him, for the moment, of the power of speech.  To say that he looked at Stella, as a prisoner in “the condemned cell” might have looked at the sheriff, announcing the morning of his execution, would be to do injustice to the prisoner.  He receives his shock without flinching; and, in proof of his composure, celebrates his wedding with the gallows by a breakfast which he will not live to digest.

“If you think as your mother does,” Romayne began, as soon as he had recovered his self-possession, “no opinion of mine shall stand in the way—­” He could get no further.  His vivid imagination saw the Archbishop and the bridesmaids, heard the hundred guests and their dreadful speeches:  his voice faltered, in spite of himself.

Stella eagerly relieved him.  “My darling, I don’t think as my mother does,” she interposed, tenderly.  “I am sorry to say we have very few sympathies in common.  Marriages, as I think, ought to be celebrated as privately as possible—­the near and dear relations present, and no one else.  If there must be rejoicings and banquets, and hundreds of invitations, let them come when the wedded pair are at home after the honeymoon, beginning life in earnest.  These are odd ideas for a woman to have—­but they are my ideas, for all that.”

Romayne’s face brightened.  “How few women possess your fine sense and your delicacy of feeling!” he exclaimed “Surely your mother must give way, when she hears we are both of one mind about our marriage.”

Stella knew her mother too well to share the opinion thus expressed.  Mrs. Eyrecourt’s capacity for holding to her own little ideas, and for persisting (where her social interests were concerned) in trying to insinuate those ideas into the minds of other persons, was a capacity which no resistance, short of absolute brutality, could overcome.  She was perfectly capable of worrying Romayne (as well as her daughter) to the utmost limits of human endurance, in the firm conviction that she was bound to convert all heretics, of their way of thinking, to the orthodox faith in the matter of weddings.  Putting this view of the case with all possible delicacy, in speaking of her mother, Stella expressed herself plainly enough, nevertheless, to enlighten Romayne.

He made another suggestion.  “Can we marry privately,” he said, “and tell Mrs. Eyrecourt of it afterward?”

This essentially masculine solution of the difficulty was at once rejected.  Stella was too good a daughter to suffer her mother to be treated with even the appearance of disrespect.  “Oh,” she said, “think how mortified and distressed my mother would be!  She must be present at my marriage.”