We sat silent. Katherine had taken off her hat and it lay on the ground beside her; she was fastening a bunch of heather into her blue and white muslin dress. “Have you looked at the portraits in the long passage yet?” I asked suddenly. “Yes; not very particularly, but I noticed there were some.” “Did you see one of a dark lady standing by a spinet, holding a bunch of flowers?” “I don’t remember. Who is she?” “Prudence Carroll,” I answered. “Look at her when you go in.” Katherine had completed her task. “Why?” she inquired, turning to me. “I think she is very like you――or you are very like her.” “I shall see; but suppose I don’t care for her?” “Then you can say I’m a fool. But you will care for her――at any rate, I do. I don’t mean that your features are just the same as hers.” “And I’m not dark, am I?” “No; at all events not _so_ dark. However, you will see what I mean――perhaps you will see.” “You’re not sure? It can’t be so very striking then.” “That’s just what it is――it _is_ striking. It mayn’t, however, be exactly obvious to everybody. When I first saw you, I kept wondering who you were like. I couldn’t get at it for a long time――then I knew.” “Well, I never even heard of her, but I’m shockingly ignorant of my ancestors.” “She wasn’t an ancestor: she was never married; the likeness isn’t physical.” “Oh, then I shan’t see it. Besides, I never _do_ see likenesses, even when they’re much less mysterious than this.” “I don’t know,――perhaps, in a way, it is mysterious. I can see it more clearly sometimes than others. I don’t think I should see it at all if you were asleep or dead.” “What a horrid idea!” She laughed, but not quite easily. “Do you not feel that these hills are familiar to you?” I asked dreamily. “I can imagine a person coming to some house like Derryaghy for the first time, and then finding that he knew this room and that, where this passage led to, what view he should see when he looked out through that little window at the top of the stairs. Or it might be that two people would come there together, and everything they said would sound like an echo from something that had been spoken before, and each, while they waited for it, would know the answer, before it had left the other’s lips.” “I’m not sure that I follow you,” said Katherine prosaically, “but I imagine you are trying to make out that I may be what-do-you-call-her Carroll come to life again. You’re the strangest boy I ever met.” “You told me I was like David. But――but――pretend it for a moment. Say you were Prudence Carroll, then who should I be?” “I haven’t any idea. Perhaps the apprentice of the artist who painted her picture, if he had an apprentice.” I considered this. It had never occurred to me before. But I could not get back, I could not discover even a faint gleam. It was not the time; I was too saturated with my actual surroundings.