Stella took the canvas in her hand, and held it to the light, and an exclamation broke involuntarily from her lips.
"How beautiful he is!"
The old man took the picture from her, and resting it on his knees, gazed at it musingly.
"Yes," he said, "it is a grand face; one does not see such a face often."
Stella leant over the chair and looked at it with a strange feeling of interest and curiosity, such as no simply beautiful picture would have aroused.
It was not the regularity of the face, with its clear-cut features and its rippling chestnut hair, that, had it been worn by a Wyndward of a hundred years ago, would have fallen in rich curls upon the square, well-formed shoulders. It was not the beauty of the face, but a something indefinable in the carriage of the head and the expression of the full, dark eyes that attracted, almost fascinated, her.
It was in a voice almost hushed by the indescribable effect produced by the face, that she said:
"And he is like that?"
"It is lifelike," he answered. "I, who painted it, should not say it, but it is like him nevertheless—that is Leycester Wyndward. Why did you ask?"
Stella hesitated.