“See if there’s a portrait,” suggested Félicia. “Maybe it was your mother in disguise, though I don’t just see how it works out.”
“No, there isn’t any. It says you couldn’t buy one in Vindobona—that either the Prince or his family had snapped all of them up, both of him and the lady, and destroyed them. There’s just the ship, two weeks back.”
Usk sprang up, as though to look at the picture, but when he was stooping over the book he whispered hastily, “Perhaps you don’t know that Prince Joseph was my aunt’s cousin?”
“Oh, I’m real sorry. How could I know?” Maimie whispered back, with a face of guileless innocence touched with anguish. Aloud, she made some remark about another picture on the same page, and Usk returned to his former seat. As he did so, he was struck by a certain alert look, which he knew well, on his uncle’s face. Félicia had turned her head when Maimie claimed her attention, and the lamplight fell full upon her profile, which was in a line with that of Queen Ernestine. Usk saw the two faces from one side, his uncle from the other, but at the same moment it flashed upon both of them that the profiles were extraordinarily alike. Lord Cyril cast a glance of calm scrutiny at his nephew, and resumed the conversation Maimie had interrupted. It was possible that he regarded the likeness as merely a coincidence, and Usk hoped this might be the case.
It might have seemed to strengthen this opinion that Lord Cyril made no remark to his nephew, but some hours later, when he looked into his wife’s boudoir, where she was spending a few minutes in chat with the sallow-faced lady-in-waiting, it was clear that he had not forgotten what he had seen.
“And what do you think of your niece that is to be, Ernestine?” he asked.
“She is very beautiful,” said the Queen, somewhat doubtfully, “but it does not seem to me that poor Usk has found her heart yet.”
“Perhaps she has none to find. What does Mlle. Mirkovics think?”
“Miss Steinherz has something of the grand air, though there is a want of repose in her manners,” was the temperate reply. “One would scarcely expect that in an American, perhaps. But she carries herself like a queen in her own right.”
“Every American woman is that by right of birth,” said Lord Cyril lazily. “Does Félicia’s face remind you of any one, Ernestine?”