"Quite possibly," she interrupted. "Only it would have been at her father's house and not mine. She does tend blind people, my father's patients." I looked at her open-mouthed. "In the name of Heaven," I exclaimed, "who are you, if not the daughter of Dr. Deane of Stavaton Street?" "My father is Mr. Henry Deane, the oculist. You asked if I were the daughter of Dr. Deane. So many people give him the wrong title I didn't trouble to correct you." It took me a few moments to recover. I had been making a pretty fool of myself. I stammered out pleas for a thousand pardons. I confused myself, and her, in explanation. Then I remembered that the fathers were twin brothers and bore a strong resemblance one to the other. What more natural than that the daughters should also be alike? "What I can't understand," said Miss Deane, "is how you mistook me for my cousin." "Your voices are identical." "But our outer semblances----" "I have never seen your cousin--she left me before I recovered my sight." "How then could you say you had my face before you for three months?" "I am afraid, Miss Deane, I was wrong in that as in everything else. It was her face. I had a mental picture of it." She put on a puzzled expression. "And you used the mental picture for the purpose of recognition?" "Yes," said I. "I give it up," said Miss Deane. She did not press me further. Her Cousin Valerie's love affairs were grounds too delicate for her to tread upon. She turned the conversation by politely asking me how I had come to consult her father. I mentioned my friend Mobray and the gun accident. She remembered the case and claimed a slight acquaintance with Mobray, whom she had met at various houses in Grandchester. My credit as a sane and reputable person being established, we began to chat most amicably. I found Miss Deane an accomplished woman. We talked books, art, travel. She had the swift wit which delights in bridging the trivial and the great. She had a playful fancy. Never have I found a personality so immediately sympathetic. I told her a sad little Viennese story in which I happened to have played a minor part, and her tenderness was as spontaneous as Valerie's--my Valerie's. She had Valerie's woodland laugh. Were it not that her personal note, her touch on the strings of life differed essentially from my beloved's, I should have held it grotesquely impossible for any human being but Valerie to be sitting in the opposite corner of that railway carriage. Indeed there were moments when she was Valerie, when the girl waiting for me at Grandchester faded into the limbo of unreal things. A kiss from those lips had fluttered on mine. It were lunacy to doubt it.