She drew it back one moment, then, remembering,
surrendered it.
"You saw this in--St. Louis, I suppose," said he awkwardly. He never
could bear to refer to those days--the days before he had come into
her life.
"Not that perhaps, but the photograph from which it was probably
painted. She was his only sister. He was educating her in the East."
And again her thoughts were drifting back to those St. Louis days,
when, but for the girl sister he so loved, she and Neil Blakely had
been well-nigh inseparable. Someone had said then, she remembered,
that she was jealous even of that love.
And now again her husband was gazing fixedly at the portrait, a light
coming into his lined and anxious face. Blakely had always carried
this miniature with him, for he now remembered that the agent, Daly,
had spoken of it. Natzie and others might well have seen it at the
reservation. The agent's wife had often seen it and had spoken of his
sorrow for the sister he had lost. The picture, she said, stood often
on his little camp table. Every Indian who entered his tent knew it
and saw it. Why, surely; Natzie, too, mused the major, and then aloud:
"I can see now what we have all been puzzling over. Angela Wren might
well have looked like this--four years ago."
"There is not the faintest resemblance," said Clarice, promptly rising
and quitting the room.
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