But even as I held the thing, flushed with my discovery, another recollection cooled me, and the structure of my discovery tumbled as quickly as it had built itself.  Little Miss had found her own picture when she found him.  Her mother had told me this definitely.  It had been clutched in his hands, and she, after a look, had tenderly replaced it to stay with his dust forever.  This I had forgotten at first, in my eagerness for light.

I pressed the spring that brought the face to my eyes, knowing it would not be her face.  Close to the light I studied it; the face of a girl, eighteen or so, with dreaming eyes that looked beyond me.  It could not be Miss Lansdale, and yet it was strangely like her—­like the Little Miss she must once have been.

But one mystery at least was now plain—­the mystery of my own mind picture.  I had not looked at this thing for ten years, but its lines had stayed with me, and this was the face of my dreaming, carried so long after its source had been forgotten.  The face of this picture had naturally enough changed to seem like the face of Miss Lansdale after I had seen her.

Perhaps it was the face of a Peavey; there was at least a family resemblance; that would explain the likeness to Miss Kate.  This was not much, but it was enough to sleep on.

As I left the house the following morning, Miss Lansdale, her skirts pinned up, was among her roses with a watering pot and a busy pair of scissors.

As I approached her I had something to say, but it was, for an interval, driven from my lips.

“Promise me,” I said instead, “never to wear a common-sense shoe.”

She stared at me with brows a trifle raised.

“Of course it will displease Mrs. Eubanks, but there is still a better reason for it.”

The brows went farther up at this until they were hardly to be detected under the broad rim of her garden hat.

Her answer was icy, even for an “Indeed?”—­quite in her best Lansdale manner.

“Yes, ‘indeed!’” I retorted somewhat rudely, “but never mind—­it’s not of the least consequence.  What I meant to say was this—­about those pictures of people, you remember.”

“I remember perfectly, and I’ve concluded that it’s all nonsense—­all of it, you understand.”

“That’s queer—­so have I.”  Had I been a third person and an observer, I would doubtless have sworn that Miss Lansdale was more surprised than pleased by this remark of mine.

“I haven’t had your picture at all,” I went on; “it was a picture of some one else, and I hadn’t thought to look at it for a long time—­had forgotten it utterly, in fact.  That’s how I came to think I knew your face before I knew you.”

“I told you it was nonsense!” and she snipped off a rose with a kind of miniature brusqueness.

“But you shall see that I had some reason.  If you find time to-day, step into my library and look at the picture.  It’s on the mantel, and the door is open.  It may be some one you know, though I doubt even that.”