On an ordinary occasion, had Knight been even quite alone with Stephen, he would hardly have alluded to his possible relationship to Elfride. But moved by attendant circumstances Knight was impelled to be confiding.
“Stephen,” he said, “this lady is Miss Swancourt. I am staying at her father’s house, as you probably know.” He stepped a few paces nearer to Smith, and said in a lower tone: “I may as well tell you that we are engaged to be married.”
Low as the words had been spoken, Elfride had heard them, and awaited Stephen’s reply in breathless silence, if that could be called silence where Elfride’s dress, at each throb of her heart, shook and indicated it like a pulse-glass, rustling also against the wall in reply to the same throbbing. The ray of daylight which reached her face lent it a blue pallor in comparison with those of the other two.
“I congratulate you,” Stephen whispered; and said aloud, “I know Miss Swancourt—a little. You must remember that my father is a parishioner of Mr. Swancourt’s.”
“I thought you might possibly not have lived at home since they have been here.”
“I have never lived at home, certainly, since that time.”
“I have seen Mr. Smith,” faltered Elfride.
“Well, there is no excuse for me. As strangers to each other I ought, I suppose, to have introduced you: as acquaintances, I should not have stood so persistently between you. But the fact is, Smith, you seem a boy to me, even now.”
Stephen appeared to have a more than previous consciousness of the intense cruelty of his fate at the present moment. He could not repress the words, uttered with a dim bitterness:
“You should have said that I seemed still the rural mechanic’s son I am, and hence an unfit subject for the ceremony of introductions.”