"She ran away from the airport, you say?"

"Yes, Earl."

"……I cannot believe it."

A study panelled in dark mahogany.

Around an old fireplace the portraits of the ancestors hung, solemn in their bearing.

The ancestors inside the gilt-edged frames look down into the room with the same indifferent eyes, every one of them.

On an oak desk with the years on it, a leather-bound ledger and a quill pen lay neatly to one side.

Through an open window, where the heavy velvet curtain had been drawn half back, a soft summer light came pouring in.

Earl Rupert Hales, sitting at the desk in the quiet of the room and receiving a report.

At the butler Sebastian's report his brow drew together.

She is a daughter raised less strictly than his sons, but she was taught the manners of a noble house without a single omission.

Along with that, he granted his daughter Isabella most of what she wanted.

And this time a daughter who, the moment she set foot on Korean soil, shook her guards off and ran. It absolutely must not happen, and it cannot happen.

"Is it that fellow?"

"It is."

"What is the reason?"

"……It appears she went to hand over a present, on the strength of the returns from this investment."

Sebastian, making the report, is careful too. Reports on the head of the house and his children have a great many parts that need more delicate handling than other business.

"Has she still not liquidated?"

"No."

"And I told her to have done with it."

Anger passed lightly across Earl Rupert Hales's eyes.

Isabella has grown up knowing neither want nor defeat.

If there is anything at all wanting in her life, it is the absence of a mother.

Isabella did not comply with the Earl's order to liquidate this oil futures investment.

Even where it is Isabella's own money invested, not complying could be taken as a challenge to a father's authority.

"I think we may watch a while longer."

Sebastian, for the first time in a long while, did not agree with…