“What are you driving at?” he said.
“Answer. Is it my portrait?” she said impatiently.
“Yes,” he said with decision.
“Then if that is my portrait it means that I was alive at that time? It is eighty years ago; and from that portrait I was then twenty-five or thirty? Consider carefully before answering. What! In the face of such a miracle you hesitate, do you? You dare not assert that it is a fact; now, dare you?”
She paused, gazing at him with compelling eyes; then she continued:
“But there is more to come. Open the frame of this miniature, the back of it, and you will find on the other side of the porcelain, another portrait. The portrait of a smiling woman, wearing a veil, an almost invisible veil, which descends as far as her eyebrows, and through which you can see her hair parted into two waving rolls. It is me again, isn’t it?”
While Beaumagnan carried out her instructions she had put on a light veil of tulle, the bottom of which touched the line of her eyebrows; and she lowered her eyes with an expression of charming reserve.
Beaumagnan compared her face with the portrait and stammered: “B-B-B-But it is you! It is!”
“Is there any doubt about it?”
“Not the slightest. It is you,” he declared.