The brothers went silently to the other end of the room. I led Lucilla, after them, to the place in which they stood. At my suggestion, Nugent was the first to take her hand, as she had requested; to hold it for a moment, and then to drop it.
"Nugent!" she said, without the slightest hesitation.
She laughed gaily. "Go on! Puzzle me if you possibly can."
The brothers noiselessly changed places. Oscar took her hand, standing exactly where Nugent had stood.
At a sign from Nugent, Oscar took her hand for the second time. She repeated his name. At a sign from me, the brothers noiselessly placed themselves, one on either side of her--Oscar on the left; Nugent on the right. I gave them the signal; and they each took one of her hands at the same moment. This time, she waited a little longer before she spoke. When she did speak, she was right once more. She turned smiling, towards the left side, pointed to him as he stood by her, and said, "Oscar!"
We were all three equally surprised. I examined Oscar's hand and Nugent's hand alternately. Except the fatal difference in the color, they were, to all intents and purposes, the same hands--the same size, the same shape, the same texture of skin; no scar or mark on the hand of one to distinguish it from the hand of the other. By what mysterious process of divination had she succeeded in discovering which was which?
She was unwilling, or unable, to reply to that question plainly.
"Something in me answers to one of them and not to the other," she said.
"I don't know. It answers to Oscar. It doesn't answer to Nugent--that's all."
She stopped any further inquiries by proposing that we should finish the evening with some music, in her own sitting-room, on the other side of the house. When we were seated together at the pianoforte--with the twin-brothers established as our audience at the other end of the room--she whispered in my ear:
"How I know which is which when they both of them take my hand. When Oscar takes it, a delicious tingle runs from his hand into mine, and steals all over me. I can't describe it any better than that."
"I understand. And when Nugent takes your hand, what do you feel?"
"And that is how you found out the difference between them down-stairs?"