The boy began to blush a little—then to smile. ‘My name is Brocklehurst—Harold Brocklehurst.... Why do you look at me so strangely?’
His question made Graham suddenly conscious of his rudeness, and also of the childishness, the impossibility of the idea that had floated into his mind. ‘I did not mean to,’ he stammered, covered with confusion. ‘I beg your pardon.’ Then, with his eyes lowered: ‘You remind me very much of some one I know.... It is rather queer ... and ... and you took me by surprise.... I was so unprepared.’
‘Unprepared!’
‘Yes.... I was thinking of him—of the other—when you came up.... You don’t understand, of course. It is the extraordinary likeness—and it is extraordinary’—he could not help looking at the boy again.
‘But likeness to whom?’ Brocklehurst wondered. ‘And why should it startle you?’
‘Ah, to whom?’ Graham echoed enigmatically. His strange fancy still hung there in the air before him, hung about his interlocutor like a light, like a blaze of dazzling sunlight. ‘I don’t know,’ he softly added.
‘You don’t know!’ Brocklehurst paused, just a little taken aback. Then as he noticed the other’s seriousness he began to laugh. ‘Aren’t you a rather queer fellow?’ he suggested with a kind of charming easiness.
‘We are both a little queer,’ Graham answered. ‘At least ... I beg your pardon——’
‘Oh, it’s all right.’
‘You see—you see I have known you for so long that—that——’ His explanation, whatever it might have been, died away.