The Golden Silence

								

over her shoulders. It was the sort of thing that happens to the heroine
of a melodrama, if she has plenty of hair; but Stephen did not think of
that then. He thought of nothing except his sympathy for a beautiful
girl brought, through no fault of her own, to the verge of starvation
and despair, and of how he could best set about helping her.
She had not even money enough to buy mourning. Lorenzi had left debts
which she could not pay. She had no friends. She did not know what was
to become of her. She had not slept for many nights. She had made up her
mind to die as her father had died, because it seemed the only thing to
do, when suddenly the thought of Stephen had flashed into her mind, as
if sent there by her guardian angel. She had heard that he was good and
charitable to everybody, and once she had seen him looking at her
kindly, in court, as if he were sorry for her, and could read something
of what was in her heart. She had imagined it perhaps. But would he
forgive her for writing to him? Would he help her, and save her life?
Any one who knew Stephen could have prophesied what his answer would be.
He had hated it when she snatched his hand to kiss at the end of their
interview; but he would scarcely have been a human young man if he had
not felt a sudden tingle of the blood at the touch of such lips as
Margot Lorenzi's. Never had she seemed so beautiful to him since that
first day; but he had called again and again, against his brother's
urgent advice (when he had confessed the first visit); and the story
that the Duchess of Amidon was telling her friends, though founded
entirely on her own imagination of the scene which had brought about
Stephen's undoing, was not very far from the truth.
Now, he saw a picture of Margot as he had seen her in the lodgings she
hated; and he wished to heaven that he might think of her as he had
thought of her then.
"I've got something important to say to you," the girl went on, when she
realized that Stephen intended to dismiss the subject of the hotel, as
he had dismissed the subject of the interview. "That's the reason I
wired. But I won't speak a word till you've told me what your brother
and the Duchess of Amidon think about you and me."
"There's nothing to tell," Stephen answered almost sullenly. And indeed
there was no news of his Cumberland visit which it would be pleasant or
wise to retail.
Margot Lorenzi's complexion was not one of her greatest beauties. It was
slightly sallow, so she made artistic use of a white cosmetic, which
gave her skin the clearness of a camellia petal. But she had been
putting on rather more than usual since her father's death, because it
was suitable as well as becoming to be pale when one was in deep
mourning. Consequently Margot could not turn perceptibly whiter, but she
felt the blood go ebbing away from her face back upon her heart.
"Stephen! Don't they mean to receive me, when we're married?" she
stammered.