“Paul Gastineau?” Herriard exclaimed. “Impossible!” He glanced at Alexia. Her eyes were on her brother with a look of mingled apprehension and incredulity.
“Yes,” Prosper went on, as he blew out a long puff of smoke, “it is rather startling, considering that the fellow was killed in that railway accident near Cordova some years ago. But the man—I have heard, but forget who, anyhow a man who knew him well—swears he saw him one evening lately.”
There was a silence; for a few moments neither of the other two could speak.
“Or his ghost,” Prosper added presently, puffing lazily at his cigar.
“Or some one very like him,” Alexia suggested, her eyes full of an uneasy speculation.
“That,” said Prosper easily, unconscious of the feeling his announcement had excited, “is probably the explanation. I was once absolutely deceived myself in that way. Stopped my own cousin in the street to find after a few words that it was not he at all, but a total stranger. And the curious part of it was that the man told me I was exactly like some one he knew. So we were both deceived.”
“It shows,” Herriard spoke mechanically, “that these personal resemblances are common enough.”
“Oh, yes,” Prosper laughed, “there are only a certain number of human moulds, and we are turned out of one or another of them with slight variations in the setting and the finish.”
“Yes,” Alexia said with an effort, speaking more to herself than to the others, “that can be the only explanation of a man who was killed years ago in Spain, being seen walking the London streets to-day.”
If her tone seemed to dismiss the strange report as easily accounted for, there was in her face a look which Herriard did not like to see.