"Where?" he asked.
"I didn't mean to shout as if there were an alarm of fire. Look at the portrait behind you!"
He turned and under the lettering of "General Thomas Sanford" he saw a clear-cut, positive face, lean, with a humorous curve to the mouth and eyes surveying the world with ready candour. When he turned back he was conscious of a silence and that all were watching him.
"Don't you see it?" asked Helen, speaking what was in the mind of the others.
"The portrait, yes. What has happened to it?" he asked. He was a little wary of something lurking in the eyes of the plain girl opposite him. They seemed to have unexplored depths. If she were having some joke on him he would feel his way, this stranger in foreign climes, and leave the next move to her.
"Of course you don't," she said. "Wait! Everybody wait!" She was gone on the errand of her impulse.
"You never know quite what Helen is going to do next," Henriette explained.
"Her French blood," murmured Mrs. Sanford.
Helen returned bearing a mirror which she had taken from above her washstand.
"Of course you didn't see it. They say that if one met his double in the street he would be the last to recognise it," she told Phil, as she held the mirror at such an angle that both General Thomas Sanford's face and his own were reflected.