Euphra fixed her eyes on her, and kept them fixed, till she was very nearly all wrong again. She turned as pale as before, and began to draw her breath hard.
“You silly goose!” said Euphra, and withdrew her eyes; upon which the girl began to breathe more freely.
Hugh was making some wise remarks in his own mind on the unsteady condition of a nature in which the imagination predominates over the powers of reflection, when Euphra turned to him, and began to tell him that that was the picture of her three or four times great-grandmother, painted by Sir Peter Lely, just after she was married.
“Isn’t she fair?” said she.—“She turned nun at last, they say.”
“She is more fair than honest,” thought Hugh. “It would take a great deal of nun to make her into a saint.” But he only said, “She is more beautiful than lovely. What was her name?”
“If you mean her maiden name, it was Halkar—Lady Euphrasia Halkar—named after me, you see. She had foreign blood in her, of course; and, to tell the truth, there were strange stories told of her, of more sorts than one. I know nothing of her family. It was never heard of in England, I believe, till after the Restoration.”
All the time Euphra was speaking, Hugh was being perplexed with that most annoying of perplexities—the flitting phantom of a resemblance, which he could not catch. He was forced to dismiss it for the present, utterly baffled.
“Were you really named after her, Miss Cameron?”
“No, no. It is a family name with us. But, indeed, I may be said to be named after her, for she was the first of us who bore it. You don’t seem to like the portrait.”
“I do not; but I cannot help looking at it, for all that.”