Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture.  He finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the pencil back in his pocket.  As he did so, she said, quietly:  “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!”

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made them seem quite boyish.  “Yes, isn’t it absurd?  It’s almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon—­But, after all, there are some advantages.  It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you.”

Katharine gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes.  “Oh, it did that long ago.  What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross.  Do you remember that night you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spoke a word to me?”

“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and boyish, but certainly sincere.  Perhaps you suspected something of the sort?”

“I believe I suspected a pose; the one that boys often affect with singers.  But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your brother’s pupils.”  Everett shook his head.  “I saw my brother’s pupils come and go.  Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part.  But they never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you speak of.”

“Yes,” observed Katharine, thoughtfully, “I noticed it then, too; but it has grown as you have grown older.  That is rather strange, when you have lived such different lives.  It’s not merely an ordinary family likeness of features, you know, but the suggestion of the other man’s personality in your face—­like an air transposed to another key.  But I’m not attempting to define it; it’s beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle—­well, uncanny,” she finished, laughing.

Everett sat looking out under the red window-blind which was raised just a little.  As it swung back and forth in the wind it revealed the glaring panorama of the desert—­a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds.  “I remember, when I was a child I used to be very sensitive about it.  I don’t think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it otherwise, but it seemed like a birthmark, or something not to be lightly spoken of.  It came into even my relations with my mother.  Ad went abroad to study when he was very young, and mother was all broken up over it.  She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was generally understood among us that she’d have made burnt-offerings of us all for him any day.  I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone on the porch on summer evenings, she used sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance.”