im
there was something familiar in the face, yet he could not place it.

The very night of her coming, therefore, he told his wife the story
and handed her the portrait. One glance was enough. "I know it, yes,"
said Mrs. Plume, "though I, too, have never seen her. She died the
winter after it was taken. It is Mr. Blakely's sister, Ethel," and
Mrs. Plume sat gazing at the sweet girl features, with strange
emotion in her aging face. There was something--some story--behind all
this that Plume could not fathom, and it nettled him. Perhaps he, too,
was yielding to a fit of nerves. Elise, the maid, had been remanded to
her room, and could be heard moving about with heavy, yet uncertain
tread. "She is right over Blakely," quoth the major impatiently. "Why
can't the girl be quiet?"

"Why did you bring him _here_, then?" was the weary answer. "I cannot
control Elise. They have treated her most cruelly."

"There are things you cannot explain and that she must," said he, and
then, to change the subject, stretched forth his hand to take again
the picture. 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.

It developed with another day that Mr