“Yes, no doubt he could tell us about the portrait if we could only get at him,” returned Edmonson coming back to his subject.  “But as to who the gentleman is, and why you have flattered me so far as to be able to discover any likeness between us, I owe you all an explanation.  And Colonel Archdale, another one besides, which I am most ready to make, for having presumed to search out the painting when I found by accident that there was one behind here.  No time is so good as the present.  Then, too, I have aroused the curiosity of these ladies and gentlemen, and I am afraid they will owe me a grudge if I don’t gratify it by telling the whole story.”

“Indeed we shall,” cried Katie Archdale.

Bulchester had entered behind the others unseen in the concentration of attention upon the portrait and its exhibitor, and had spent his moment of amazement in silence.  He now glided up to Edmonson and said something to him in an undertone too low to be caught by anyone else.  The other replied by a look of scorn, and a muttered something that sounded very like, “You always were a fool.”  Then he stood silent, glancing first at Stephen, and then at the Colonel.  The young man faced him in haughty defiance of his manner which made his words almost insulting.  The elder stood with his suavity a little disturbed, it is true; but no one except Edmonson found fear in his face, or interpreted what he said as a desire of postponement when he suggested that if there were anything interesting to be heard they should wait until all the stragglers had come up, and then adjourn to the drawing-room where they would be more comfortable.

Edmonson bowed slightly in answer, smiled, thanked him, but observed that it was most flattering to an orator to find his audience increase as he went on, and began: 

“I am to tell you who this gentleman of the portrait is, and why I resemble him.”

All at once Stephen glanced at Elizabeth.  He had found her in the hall with Edmonson.  Had she any hand in this unveiling of an ancestral face?  He thought of the possibility of shame that might follow—­of shame, because he remembered the talk of the two men in the woods and the old butler’s look at Edmonson that very morning.  If this triumphant fellow had any such thing to tell, did she already know it?  Was she upon such terms of intimacy with him as this?  She stood apart, still near the doorway where Edmonson had left her.  None of the curiosity expressed everywhere else was in her face.  She seemed scarcely listening; she looked as if she were far away and the people about her and the words they were saying belonged to a different world.  But it was not so, for it was the consciousness that she was in the world about her and bound to it that gave her the expression of struggle.  Chains held her when she wanted to be free.  She was one too many here.  Before her was Archdale’s face as he had looked at Katie, and between these two a stupid woman whom she had no patience with, whom she hated—­herself.  And now there might be coming an added pain that she had brought.  She did not care especially for Archdale’s pain, except that it was of her bringing.