“But there is more to come. Open the frame of this miniature, the back of it, and you will find on the other side of the porcelain, another portrait. The portrait of a smiling woman, wearing a veil, an almost invisible veil, which descends as far as her eyebrows, and through which you can see her hair parted into two waving rolls. It is me again, isn’t it?” While Beaumagnan carried out her instructions she had put on a light veil of tulle, the bottom of which touched the line of her eyebrows; and she lowered her eyes with an expression of charming reserve. Beaumagnan compared her face with the portrait and stammered: “B-B-B-But it is you! It is!” “Is there any doubt about it?” “Not the slightest. It is you,” he declared. “Well, read the date on the right side of it.” Beaumagnan read out: “Painted at Milan in the year 1498.” She repeated: “In 1498--that’s four hundred years ago?” She laughed outright, a clear, ringing laugh. “Don’t look so astonished,” she said. “I have known of the existence of this double portrait for a long time, and I have been hunting for it. But you may take it from me that there is no miracle about it. I am not going to try to persuade you that I was that painter’s model and that I am four hundred years old. No: that is merely the face of the Virgin Mary; and it is a copy of a fragment of the Holy Family of Bernardino Luini, a Milanese painter and a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci.” Then, with a sudden gravity, and without giving her adversary time to breathe, she said to him: “You understand now what I am driving at, don’t you, Beaumagnan? Between the Virgin of Luini, the young girl of Moscow and myself, there is that elusive, marvellous, and yet undeniable bond, a likeness--an absolute likeness.... Three faces in one. Three faces which are not those of three different women, but which are _the face of the same woman_. Then why do you refuse to admit that the same phenomenon, after all a perfectly natural phenomenon, should not reproduce itself in other circumstances, and that the woman whom you saw in your bedroom was not me, but another woman who resembles me so closely as to deceive you.... Another woman who knew and murdered your friends Saint-Hébert and d’Isneauval?” “I saw.... I saw!” protested Beaumagnan, who had come so close to her that he almost touched her, and he drew himself up, pale as death and quivering with indignation. “I saw! I saw with my eyes!” “Your eyes also see the portrait of twenty-five years ago and the miniature of eighty years ago, and the picture of four hundred years ago. Is that me too?” She presented to Beaumagnan’s gaze her young face in all its fresh beauty, that perfect row of white teeth, her delicately tinted, rounded cheeks, her clear and limpid child’s eyes.