n front of her and her
head resting on the bend of her arm; her eyes looked upward, and her
lips were just parted.

"Have I been staring at you?" he inquired abruptly.

"Well, yes, you have," she answered, laughing. "But a strange cousin
expects to be examined rather carefully. Do I pass muster among the
Tristrams? Or am I all the hated Gainsborough?"

He looked at her again and earnestly. She met the look without lowering
her eyes or altering her position in any particular.

"It's too absurd!" he declared, half fretful, half amused. "You're
features aren't so very much alike--except the eyes, they are--and your
hair's darker. But you move and carry yourself and turn your head as she
did. And that position you're in now--why I've seen her in it a thousand
times! Your arm there and your foot stuck out----"

His voice grew louder as he went on, his petulant amusement giving way
to an agitation imperfectly suppressed.

"What do you mean?" she asked, catching excitement from him.

"Why, my mother. That's her attitude, and your walk's her walk, and your
voice her voice. You're her--all over! Why, when I saw you by the Pool
just now, a hundred yards off, strolling on the bank----"

"Yes?" she half-whispered. "You started, didn't you?"

"Yes, I started. I thought for a moment I saw my mother's ghost. I
thought my mother had come back to Blent. And it is--you!"

He threw out his hands in a gesture of what seemed despair.

XII

FIGHTERS AND DOUBTERS

"Miss S. wasn't so far wrong after all!" exclaimed Mina Zabriska,
flinging down a letter on the table by her.

It was three days after Addie Tristram's funeral. Mina had attended that
ceremony, or rather watched it from a little way off. She had seen
Gainsborough's spare humble figure, she had seen too, with an acute
interest, the tall slim girl all in black, heavily veiled, who walked
beside him, just behind the new Lord Tristram. She had also, of course,
seen all the neighbors who were looking on like herself, but who gave
their best attention to Janie Iver and disappointed Miss S. by asking
hardly any questions about the Gainsboroughs. Little indeed would have
been said concerning them except for the fact that Gainsborough (true to
his knack of the unlucky) caught a chill on the occasion and was
confined to his bed down at Blent. A most vexatious occurrence for Lord
Tristram, said Miss S. But one that he ought to bear patiently, added
Mrs Trumbler. And af