“And you’ve never found Tom? Not even when his father died?”
“We don’t know that he knows it, even. It was just before all the confusion and change of the big war.”
“Yes, but if your Aunt Lily was only a third cousin of your stepfather, and married a man named Charpentier, he—your stepfather, I mean—wasn’t really any relation to Gabrielle, then?” Gwen persisted, with another puzzled look from the portrait to Gay’s glowing face.
“A sort of distant cousin, but that goes pretty far back,” Flora said, unexpectedly, breaking through another conversation that she had been having on the other side of the fireplace. “My sister and I were cousins of Roger Fleming, third cousins, and my mother lived here, kept house for him, for years. My husband was William Fleming, Roger’s brother. But Gabrielle is my sister’s child—a sister named Lily, who died many years ago.”
“It’s hopelessly tangled!” Gay said, with a laugh.
“No, but look—look here!” Gwen Montallen had persisted. Gently catching Gay by the shoulder, for they were all standing at the moment, she wheeled her about so that the company could encompass with one look the painted likeness of the man of forty and the eighteen-year-old girl. “Do you see it, Laura?” she said, eagerly. “The mouth and the shape of the eyes—I saw it the instant she came into the room!”
“I see it,” young Bart Montallen agreed, with a nod. “For a while I couldn’t think who Miss Gabrielle looked like, and then I knew it was the picture.”
“Nonsense!” Sylvia said, looking from one to the other. “Uncle Roger had such black hair and such a white skin——”
“Really your colouring, Sylvia,” David suggested. “But apart from the colouring,” he added. “I see the likeness. Look at Gay’s mouth—look, Aunt Flora——”
“No, you may see it in the picture,” Flora said, with her voice plunging in her throat like a candle flame in the wind. “But they—they are not alike. Lily—my sister—Gabrielle’s mother—was dark, with rosy cheeks, something like Roger. But Roger—Roger never looked much like that picture—he hated it—always said it made him look fat——”