"I have come to beg the use of your curricle," she continued. "You can return with Anvar. You seem wonderfully pleased at the prospect of other company than mine. Yet I did my best to entertain you."
Accompanying these words with an arch smile, she returned to Reva, who was explaining to the old lady that she had no intention of binding up her hair, as she was about to return with Ialma.
The first portraits shown in the apparatus aroused in me but a faint interest. My mind was inclined to revert to a subject having no immediate connection with them. But at last my indifference was thoroughly dispelled.
"Good heavens!" I exclaimed, with a start, as I looked in startled surprise at the portrait that had just made its appearance. It seemed to live and move, even to smile from the window-like aperture where it presented itself.
"What was that you said?" inquired our hostess. "It sounded strange."
How the above exclamation had escaped from me, I cannot explain except by the general tendency to revert, when under the influence of strong excitement, to the tongue first used in childhood. I explained, somewhat confusedly, that I had been startled by the lifelike fidelity of the portrait. It was indeed that of my own mother, changed, it is true, somewhat as I myself was changed, and wearing the costume of the period. Yet the change was not much greater than that sometimes seen in a person from one day to another. We all have our good days, on which we look and speak our best. On such a day might this portrait of my mother have been taken.
