"Why," she cried, in an eager voice, "that's father—my father!"
"Your father, my dear?" said the colonel, astonished in his turn. "Impossible! This is a portrait of my son."
"But it is father!" returned Isobel. "It's the same photo which we have at home, only larger. That's the V.C. he won in India, and his Guards uniform. And the other picture is little Aunt Isobel!"
"What do you mean?" asked the colonel hastily. "How could it be your Aunt Isobel?"
"I don't know, but it is!" replied Isobel. "I have a tiny painting exactly like it, done on ivory, inside a morocco case. It belonged to father, and he left it to me. She was his only sister, and she died when she was eleven years old—just the same age as I am."
For answer the colonel took Isobel by the shoulders, and holding her beneath the portrait, looked narrowly at her face. The evening sunshine, flooding through the window, fell on the fair hair, and lighted it up with the same golden gleam as that of the child in the picture above; the gray eyes of both seemed to meet him with the same half-wistful, half-trustful gaze.
"The likeness is extraordinary," he murmured. "I wonder I have never noticed it before. Is it possible I could have made so great a mistake? In what regiment was your father?"
"He was in the Fifth Dragoon Guards."
"You have told me he is dead?"
"Yes; he was killed in the Boer war."