"Your father sent it to me," he explained.
"Not a double, but a treble!" exclaimed Helen.
"It's the way of the blood," continued the vicar. "It skips generations, but it's always there—early in the seventeenth century, late in the eighteenth, and now early in the twentieth."
"But the one in the eighteenth was a wicked rebel, disloyal to our German king!" Helen put in again, yielding to temptation. "Old Thomas, there, would have disowned him."
"Helen!" admonished her aunt. "It was only a family quarrel."
"But I believe that old Thomas would have been on George Washington's right hand," said Helen. "He looks it."
Meanwhile, Phil was looking at the three faces, so similar that he might well have been in doubt which was his own. If he were expected to rise and make a fitting speech it was beyond his sense of humour.
"Help! help! Too much ancestor!" he cried out; and half rising he seized Helen's hands, pushing the mirror away at the same time that he held her at arms' length. "You began it!"
She was flushing to the roots of her hair. How strong he was! How silly she had been!
"No, the ancestor! Ancestors begin everything for everybody!" she retorted. "And if you will let go of me I will put the mirror away."