"I have never seen your cousin--she left me before I recovered my sight."
"How then could you say you had my face before you for three months?"
"I am afraid, Miss Deane, I was wrong in that as in everything else. It was her face. I had a mental picture of it."
She put on a puzzled expression. "And you used the mental picture for the purpose of recognition?"
She did not press me further. Her Cousin Valerie's love affairs were grounds too delicate for her to tread upon. She turned the conversation by politely asking me how I had come to consult her father. I mentioned my friend Mobray and the gun accident. She remembered the case and claimed a slight acquaintance with Mobray, whom she had met at various houses in Grandchester. My credit as a sane and reputable person being established, we began to chat most amicably. I found Miss Deane an accomplished woman. We talked books, art, travel. She had the swift wit which delights in bridging the trivial and the great. She had a playful fancy. Never have I found a personality so immediately sympathetic. I told her a sad little Viennese story in which I happened to have played a minor part, and her tenderness was as spontaneous as Valerie's--my Valerie's. She had Valerie's woodland laugh. Were it not that her personal note, her touch on the strings of life differed essentially from my beloved's, I should have held it grotesquely impossible for any human being but Valerie to be sitting in the opposite corner of that railway carriage. Indeed there were moments when she was Valerie, when the girl waiting for me at Grandchester faded into the limbo of unreal things. A kiss from those lips had fluttered on mine. It were lunacy to doubt it.
During intervals of non-illusion I examined her face critically. There was no question of its unattractiveness to the casual observer. The nose was too large and fleshy, the teeth too prominent, the eyes too small. But my love had pierced to its underlying spirituality, and it was the face above all others that I desired.
Toward the end of a remarkably short four hours' journey, Miss Deane graciously expressed the hope that we might meet again.
"I shall ask Valerie," said I, "to present me in due form."