The Golden Silence | Page 2

he happens to be young and good-looking. But all his popularity won't make the women who like him receive his wife. She isn't a woman's woman."
"I should think not, indeed! We're too clever to be taken in by that sort, all eyes and melodrama. They say Lord Northmorland warned his brother against her, and prophesied she'd get hold of him, if he didn't let her alone. The Duchess of Amidon told Lady Peggy Lynch--whom I know a little--that immediately after Lorenzi committed suicide, this Margot girl wrote to Stephen Knight and implored him to help her. I can quite believe she would. Fancy the daughter of the unsuccessful claimant to his brother's title writing begging letters to a young man like Stephen Knight! It appeals to one's sense of humour."
"What a pity Knight didn't see it in that light--what?"
"Yet he has a sense of humour, I believe. It's supposed to be one of his charms. But the sense of humour often fails where one's own affairs are concerned. You know he's celebrated for his quaint ideas about life. They say he has socialistic views, or something rather like them. His brother and he are as different from one another as light is from darkness. Stephen gives away a lot of money, and Lady Peggy says that nobody ever asks him for anything in vain. He can't stand seeing people unhappy, if he can do anything to help. Probably, after he'd been kind to the Lorenzi girl, against his brother's advice, and gone to see her a few times, she grovelled at his feet and told him she was all alone in the world, and would die if he didn't love her. He's just young enough and romantic enough to be caught in that way!"
"He's no boy. He must be nearly thirty."
"All nice, normal men are boys until after thirty. Lady Peggy's new name for this poor child is the Martyr Knight."
"St. Stephen the Second is the last thing I heard. Stephen the First was a martyr too, wasn't he? Stoned to death or something."
"I believe so," hastily returned the lady, who was not learned in martyrology. "He will be stoned, too, if he tries to force Miss Lorenzi on his family, or even on his friends. He'll find that he'll have to take her abroad."
"That might be a good working plan. Foreigners wouldn't shudder at her accent. And she's certainly one of the most gorgeously beautiful creatures I ever saw."
"Yes, that's just the right expression. Gorgeous. And--a creature."
They both laughed, and fell to talking again of the interview.
Stephen Knight's ears were burning. He could not hear any of the things people were saying; but he had a lively imagination, and, always sensitive, he had grown morbidly so since the beginning of the Northmorland-Lorenzi case, when all the failings and eccentricities of the family had been reviewed before the public eye, like a succession of cinematograph pictures. It did not occur to Stephen that he was an object of pity, but he felt that through his own folly and that of another, he had become a kind of scarecrow, a figure of fun: and because until now the world had laughed with instead of at him, he would rather have faced a shower of bullets than a ripple of ridicule.
"How do you do?" he inquired stiffly, and shook Miss Lorenzi's hand as she gave it without rising from the pink sofa. She gazed up at him with immense, yellowish brown eyes, then fluttered her long black lashes in a way she had, which was thrilling--the first time you saw it. But Stephen had seen it often.
"I am glad you've come, my White Knight!" she said in her contralto voice, which would have been charming but for a crude accent. "I was so afraid you were cross."
"I'm not cross, only extremely ang--vexed if you really did talk to that journalist fellow," Stephen answered, trying not to speak sharply, and keeping his tone low. "Only, for Heaven's sake, Margot, don't call me--what you did call me--anywhere, but especially here, where we might as well be on the stage of a theatre."
"Nobody can hear us," she defended herself. "You ought to like that dear little name I made up because you came to my rescue, and saved me from following my father--came into my life as if you'd been a modern St. George. Calling you my 'White Knight' shows you how I feel--how I appreciate you and everything. If you just would realize that, you couldn't scold me."
"I'm not scolding you," he said desperately. "But couldn't you have stopped in your sitting-room--I suppose you have one--and let me see you there? It's loathsome making a show of ourselves----"
"I haven't a private sitting-room. It would have been too extravagant," returned Miss Lorenzi. "Please sit down--by