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“,” asked Constance, “where is Papa’s portrait?”

“In the boudoir.”

“Oh, so Mamma has moved it! I want to see it.”

She went with Dorine through the drawing-room, past the card-tables. . . . She noticed that the conversation at once stopped at the table where Adolphine and Uncle Ruyvenaer were playing and that her sister raised her voice and said:

“Did I deal? . . . Diamonds!”

“They were talking about me,” thought Constance.

She went into the boudoir with Dorine: there was a card-table, with cards and markers, but there was no one in the room. Decanters and glasses, sandwiches and cakes had been put out in readiness for later.

“Papa,” said Constance, softly.

She looked up at the big portrait. It was not a work of art; it was painted in the regulation, wooden style of thirty or forty years before; and it struck Constance as an ugly daub, dark and flat, in spite of all the gold on the governor-general’s uniform, all the stars of the orders. The portrait represented a tall and commanding man, with a hard face and dark, stony eyes.