She was quite alone when I called, and asked me immediately if I had
brought the miniatures; and looked at them quite eagerly, and then at
me, and exclaimed--

"Good heavens, you are your father's very image!"

Indeed, I had always been considered so.

Both his eyebrows and mine, especially, met in a singular and
characteristic fashion at the bridge of the nose, and she seemed much
struck by this. He was represented in the uniform of Charles X's _gardes
du corps_, in which he had served for two years, and had acquired the
nickname of "le beau Pasquier." Mrs. Deane seemed never to tire of
gazing at it, and remarked that my father "must have been the very ideal
of a young girl's dream" (an indirect compliment which made me blush
after what she had just said of the likeness between us. I almost began
to wonder whether she was going to try and make a fool of me again, as
she had so successfully done a few years ago).

Then she became interested again in my early life and recollections, and
wanted to know whether my parents were fond of each other. They were a
most devoted and lover-like pair, and had loved each other at first
sight and until death, and I told her so; and so on until I became quite
excited, and imagined she must know of some good fortune to which I was
entitled, and had been kept out of by the machinations of a
wicked uncle.

For I had long discovered in my dreams that he had been my father's
bitterest enemy and the main cause of his financial ruin, by selfish,
heartless, and dishonest deeds too complicated to explain here--a