“You didn’t get on with Nellie last night?” she asked, alluding to his “worrying.”  Having taken the baby out she had sat down on the stool by the open piano.

Ned looked up.  “How do you know?  Has she been here?”

“No.  She hasn’t been here, but I can tell.  You men always carry your hearts on your sleeve, when you think you aren’t.  You asked her to marry you, I suppose, and she said ‘No.’  Isn’t that it?”

“I can’t tell you all about it, Mrs. Stratton,” answered Ned, frankly.  “That’s about it.  But she did quite right.  She thought she shouldn’t and when Nellie thinks anything she tries to do it.  That’s what should be.”

Mrs. Stratton strummed a few notes.  “I’ll show you something,” she said, finally, getting up.  “It passes the time to show old curiosities.”

She left the room, returning in a few minutes with a quaint box of dark wood, bound with chased iron work and inlaid with some semi-transparent substance in the pattern of a coat-of-arms.  She opened it with a little key that hung on her watch chain.  Inside were a number of compartments, covered with little lids.  She lifted them all, together, exposing under the tray a deeper recess.  From this she took a miniature case.

“Look at it!” she said, smiling.  “I ought to charge you sixpence but I won’t.”

Ned pressed the spring, the lid of the case flew up, and there, in water-colour, was the head and bust of a girl.  The face was a delicate oval, the mouth soft and sweet, the eyes bright with youth and health, the whole appearance telling of winning grace and cultured beauty.  The fullness of the brows betrayed the artist instinct.  The hair was drawn to the top of the head in a strange foreign fashion.  The softly curving lines of face and figure showed womanhood begun.

“She is very beautiful,” commented Ned.  Then, looking at it more closely:  “Do you know that somehow, although it’s not like her, this reminds me of Nellie?”

“I knew you’d say that,” remarked Connie, swinging round on the music stool so as to reach the keys again and striking a note or two softly.  “It has got Nellie’s presentment, whatever you call it.  I noticed it the first time I saw Nellie.  That was how we happened to speak first.  Harry noticed it, too, without my having said a word to him.  They might be sisters, only Nellie’s naturally more self-reliant and determined and has had a hard life of it, while she”—­nodding at the miniature—­“had been nursed in rose-leaves up to the time it was taken.”

“I don’t see just where the likeness comes in,” said Ned, trying to analyse the portrait.

“It’s about the eyes and the mouth particularly, as well as a general similitude,” explained Connie.

“As I tell Nellie, she’s got a vicious way of setting her lips, so,” and Mrs. Stratton, mimicking, drew the corners of her mouth down in Nellie’s style.  “Then she draws her brows down till altogether she looks as though the burden of the whole world was on her.  But underneath she has the same gentle mouth and open eyes and artist forehead as the picture and one feels it.  It’s very strange, don’t you know, that Geisner never seemed to notice it and yet he generally notices everything.  After all, I don’t know that it is so strange.  It’s human nature.”