The Golden Silence

								

"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