It nettled him exceedingly, for he was only too conscious of his own inferiority.
“Well, Miss Huntress, are you, like many others, trying to solve within yourself the mystery of my resemblance to your cousin, that you observe me so closely,” he asked, with an amused smile, upon finding her gaze riveted upon his face instead of the picture before which they were standing.
Gladys blushed slightly.
“I shall have to plead guilty, Mr. Mapleson,” she confessed. “I trust you will excuse me if I have appeared rude, but, really, to me it seems the strangest thing imaginable.”
“It is, indeed,” he said, and added to himself: “and dusedly uncomfortable to me, too.”
“I wonder if you are not in some way related,” Gladys said, musingly, and more to herself than to him.
Everet Mapleson’s face darkened.
“I do not think so,” he answered, curtly. “He is a Northerner—I was born at the South. My father is a Southern gentleman, and has always resided near Richmond, Virginia, excepting during the war, when he was in the field or camp most of the time, and a year or two that he spent traveling in Europe.”
Gladys was conscious of a slight feeling of resentment toward her companion during this speech. The emphasis which he had, perhaps unconsciously, expended upon his personal pronouns, and the fact of his father being a “Southern gentleman,” implied a sense of superiority which grated harshly upon her ear.
“Is your mother also a native of the South?” she asked.