"When you come to Mervaux," Henriette said, "Jacqueline will make you forest strawberry tartlets as only a French cook can and omelets so light that they have to be weighed down lest they fly out of the window when they are brought to table. We're all for art at Mervaux." She again had the monopoly of his attention. "Do you allow spectators?" he asked. "May I lie on the grass and watch you paint, or shall I be required to pull up trees and rearrange the landscape?" "It depends. I----" she murmured thoughtfully as she stirred her coffee. Helen did not hear what they were saying. If they were preoccupied with each other, she was preoccupied with the portrait. The living face underneath the frame was in the same pose as its prototype. Phil's unconsciousness of what was so apparent to other eyes gave dramatic point to the situation. At last she could restrain herself no longer. She cut into Henriette's sentence with her outcry: "Look! You must look!" For him there was a sudden transition from a concentration of attention on Henriette to Helen's eyes, flaming with intensity, not lacking in mischief, as she leaned across the table. "Where?" he asked. "I didn't mean to shout as if there were an alarm of fire. Look at the portrait behind you!" He turned and under the lettering of "General Thomas Sanford" he saw a clear-cut, positive face, lean, with a humorous curve to the mouth and eyes surveying the world with ready candour. When he turned back he was conscious of a silence and that all were watching him. "Don't you see it?" asked Helen, speaking what was in the mind of the others. "The portrait, yes. What has happened to it?" he asked. He was a little wary of something lurking in the eyes of the plain girl opposite him. They seemed to have unexplored depths. If she were having some joke on him he would feel his way, this stranger in foreign climes, and leave the next move to her. "Of course you don't," she said. "Wait! Everybody wait!" She was gone on the errand of her impulse. "You never know quite what Helen is going to do next," Henriette explained. "Her French blood," murmured Mrs. Sanford. Helen returned bearing a mirror which she had taken from above her washstand. "Of course you didn't see it. They say that if one met his double in the street he would be the last to recognise it," she told Phil, as she held the mirror at such an angle that both General Thomas Sanford's face and his own were reflected.