ould have: the portrait--pretty bad, in the
taste of the time, I admit--and the three or four photographs you must
have noticed with it at Mrs. Brook's. These things must have compared
themselves for you with my photograph in there of the granddaughter.
The similarity of course we had all observed, but it has taken your
wonderful memory and your happy vision to put into it all the detail."

Mr. Longdon thought a moment, giving a dab with his pocket-handkerchief.
"Very true--you're quite right. It's far beyond any identity in the
pictures. But why did you tell me," he added more sharply, "that she
isn't beautiful?"

"You've deprived me," Vanderbank laughed, "of the power of expressing
civilly any surprise at your finding her so. But I said to you, please
remember, nothing that qualified a jot my sense of the special stamp of
her face. I've always positively found in it a recall of the type of the
period you must be thinking of. It isn't a bit modern. It's a face of
Sir Thomas Lawrence--"

"It's a face of Gainsborough!" Mr. Longdon returned with spirit. "Lady
Julia herself harked back."

Vanderbank, clearly, was equally touched and amused. "Let us say at once
that it's a face of Raphael."

His old friend's hand was instantly on his arm. "That's exactly what I
often said to myself of Lady Julia's."

"The forehead's a little too high," said Vanderbank.

"But it's just that excess that, with the exquisite eyes and the
particular disposition round it of the fair hair, makes the individual
grace, makes the beauty of the resemblance."

Released by Lady Julia's lover, the young man in turn grasped him as
an encouragement to confidence. "It's a face that should have the
long side-ringlets of 1830. It should have the rest of the personal
arrangement, the pelisse, the shape of bonnet, the sprigged muslin
dress and the cross-laced sandals. It should have arrived in a pea-green
'tilbury' and be a reader of Mrs. Radcliffe. And all this to complete
the Raphael!"

Mr. Longdon, who, his discovery proclaimed, had begun, as might have
been said, to live with it, looked hard a moment at his companion. "How
you've observed her!"

Vanderbank met it without confusion. "Whom haven't I observed? Do you
like her?" he then rather oddly and abruptly asked.

The old man broke away again. "How can I tell--with such disparities?"

"The manner must be different," Vanderbank suggested. "And the things
she says."

His visitor was before