“Well, it looks just like him anyway,” insisted Polly. “Perhaps it isn’t,” she added disappointedly.
Before they reached the piazza steps, the stranger arose and went inside.
“It doesn’t walk like Mr. Morrow,” admitted Polly. “But I wish he’d stayed, I wanted to see him nearer.”
For several days, however, no opportunity came for observing the man at close range. In the big dining-hall, even if he chanced to be there at the same time, he sat the entire length of the room away from her, and they did not meet elsewhere. Then, one morning, at a turn of the long piazza, they chanced to come face to face, and Polly, struck by his remarkable resemblance to the father of her friend, could not forbear to speak.
“I beg your pardon,” she began, half afraid now that she had actually started, “but aren’t you Mr. Morrow,—the one I used to see at the hospital in Fair Harbor?”
A puzzled look swept the man’s face. Then he smiled.
“I think you are mistaken, little lady. My name is Winship, Bradford Winship of New York.”
“You look almost exactly like him,” returned Polly, even now refusing to be quite convinced, although there was not a trace of recognition in the smiling face she was scanning.
“I seem to have two or three doubles around the country,” he remarked. “I am continually being taken for somebody or other. Sorry not to have had the previous pleasure of your acquaintance, but I hope that we may follow up the little we have made.”
He left her with a deferential bow, and she ran to tell Patricia and Ilga of her blunder. How Harold would have laughed! But he had left for home as soon as it had been ascertained that the trains were running on time.