But the amazing likeness was in the voices. Closing his eyes, Phil had
difficulty in telling which one of the two was speaking. Both voices
were pleasant, though the beautiful girl's voice seemed much the
pleasanter of the two when his eyes were open and the plain one's an
imitation.
He thought he should like to get acquainted, but he had not the
courage. He could not offer them papers or magazines when evidently
they were not in a mood to read. Besides, that sort of thing is not
done in England, or, for that, matter, in America, as a rule, on short
train journeys. Except for that one glance from the beautiful one,
which was to any human being in sight as an audience, he had no sign
that they recognised that there was any one else in the compartment.
"I shall be glad to be in Truckleford again, shan't you?" asked the
plain girl.
"Of course I shall! I can see Uncle Arthur waiting on the platform for
us now."
"And hear him say Henriette, my dear, and Helen, my dear!"
Then they were surprised by the young man opposite them declaring that
he must be about their seventeenth degree cousin and that he was going
to Truckleford, too.
"Really!" they exclaimed together.
He might have known what they would say. He had wondered if Americans
used guess as often as the English use really. There are many kinds of
reallys: forbidding, surprised, sceptical, inquiring. This was all
kinds. It was also the kind that leaves the next move with the other
person.
"That is, if the Reverend Arthur Sanford, of Truckleford," Phil
explained, "is my sixteenth cousin and you are Henriette and Helen
Ribot, and my father, the Reverend Franklin Sanford, of Longfield,
Massachusetts, has reckoned accurately."
"It sounds very mathematical," said Helen, the plain one, thoughtfully,
looking toward Henriette to take the lead, which she did charmingly.
"We've heard about you, Cousin Philip Sanford," she said, and her eyes
were sparkling into his in a way that made it difficult to look away;
"let us consider ourselves introduced."
There was a touch of the grand manner about the way she did this; in
part it was mischievous, her eyes said. But she did it delightfully,
and Helen, who held out her hand in turn, seemed plainer than ever.
But she arrested his attention with her remark:
"I had a suspicion that it was you all the time."
"Why?"
"You'll see, later." He was conscious of a closer scrutiny of his
features, and she added triumphantly: "Yes, you'll see, later."
Then she sank back on the cushions. When seventeenth cousin meets
seventeenth cousin for the first time there is enough to say. Helen
looked from one to the other, listening. It seemed her natural role.
Phil almost forgot her existence until the train stopped at Truckleford
and they stepped down on the station platform to be welcomed by an
elderly clergyman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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