...
When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the
piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his
fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her
meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious
significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing,
did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.
When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as
harmoniously as the music.... "Do you know what I wish you would
do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about
yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think
about you...."
"Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished.
"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly,
"I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young
lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think
about her."
A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh
yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but
now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the
world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?"
"Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "_Honor!_
Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold.
She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be
strictly non-existent.
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