‘Strange that the likeness did not occur to me when I saw that picture first,’ he thought. ‘But at that time I had only looked at Justina with the eye of indifference. I did not know her face by heart as I do now. And I remember that even then the picture struck me as like some one I knew. Memory only failed to recall the individual.’
Those dark blue-grey eyes, with their somewhat melancholy expression, were so like the eyes he had seen looking at him mournfully only three weeks ago, when Justina bade him good-bye; the eyes which he faintly remembered looking up at him for the first time, in the buttercup meadow near Eborsham. He put down the candle without a word.
‘I hope you have stared long enough at that picture,’ said Viola, laughing. ‘You appear to find it remarkably interesting.’
‘It is a very interesting portrait—to me.’
‘Why to you, in particular?’
‘Because it resembles some one very dear to me.’
‘Oh, I understand,’ said Viola, gently. ‘Your poor friend, James Penwyn!’
Maurice did not attempt to set her right.
‘Now let us look at the books,’ he said, going to the secretaire, the upper shelves of which held about thirty volumes, all well bound. They were Valpy’s Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hood, and a few other volumes, chiefly Oxford classics, which Mr. Penwyn had brought from the University; not by any means the books of a man wanting in refinement or culture. That they had been well read was evident to Maurice, on looking into some of the volumes. Many a verse underlined in pencil marked the reader’s appreciation.
In a volume of Byron, containing ‘Manfred,’ and some of the minor poems, Maurice found a pencilled note here and there, in a woman’s hand, which he recognised as Muriel Trevanard’s; words of praise or of criticism, but in all cases denoting a cultivated mind and a sound judgment. A girl who could write thus was hardly likely to have been fooled by the first seducer who came across her path.