They walked side by side through the broad hall, with its Turkish carpet, statuary in niches, and stands of blooming flowers, up the broad stairway to a suite of beautiful rooms in cream and scarlet.
“I hope you will like these rooms. Mamma had them furnished over but a few months ago. Mine are like these, only in blue,” said Juliette, with a patronizing air that at once aroused a teasing mood in Pansy, and she exclaimed:
“Then I ought to have had your rooms instead of these, for blue is my color, too!”
She saw a frown contract Juliette’s eyebrows, but she took no notice, and walked over to the mantel, where the first thing she saw was the handsome face of Norman Wylde smiling on her from an easel frame. It gave her a start, but she had nerved herself to meet even the original in this house, and now she merely lifted her arm to take up a piece of bric-a-brac and examine it more closely, when the hanging sleeve of her light gray wrap caught the top of the small easel, and it was instantly hurled to the floor.
“Oh, what have I broken?” she cried, in pretended dismay. And Juliette came forward to gather up the fragments.
“The easel is broken, but the photograph is unhurt. See,” she said, holding it up before Pansy’s eyes and watching her closely; but Pansy glanced at it with the careless interest of a stranger.
“What a handsome young man!” she said. “Is he one of your admirers, Miss Ives?”
“I was once engaged to him,” Juliette answered. “I will take it away,” she added, hurrying out of the room to conceal her chagrin at the failure of her first test.
She could not decide whether the accident had been a real one or not. Pansy had carried it out with such perfect ease that she began to falter in her belief that this was Pansy Laurens.
“I may possibly be mistaken, but the likeness is so startling that I shall test her in every way,” she decided.