“Oh, you didn’t,” Miss Dean contradicted gaily. “You _couldn’t_! The likeness is amazing! Oh, pshaw! it is no likeness. He is guying us. This _is_ Randal Ducie.”
“You are the twin brother of my young friend, Randal Ducie?” Colonel Kenwynton asked, smiling, an old gentleman of the old school, with a courteous manner and a commanding presence. His tall figure still retained the muscular slenderness of his athletic youth and his stately martial carriage; his dense snowy hair, brushed forward to his brow and parted on the side, and also, straight down the back, the white imperial and long military mustachios gave him the look of a portrait of some by-gone celebrity rather than a man of to-day, so had the thought of this fashion perished. His age was frosty but kindly, and the young man responded with covert humor, as if elucidating a mystery.
“Oh, yes, we have always been twins,” he declared.
“How _did_ you know the difference, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney?” demanded Miss Dean.
“I knew it at once,” she replied, still smiling, but the gravity in the eyes of her husband deepened momently as he gazed, silently, motionlessly at her. “I myself don’t know the difference at all,” said the subject of the discussion. “When I am with Ran I feel as if I were looking into a mirror.”
“Oh, how quaint,--how enchanting it must be,” cried Miss Dean extravagantly.
“And so convenient,--I have always made Ran try the new hair cuts first.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean any such preposterous thing as that--but to have another self so near, so dear, to duplicate one’s lot in life, to understand and sympathize with every sentiment, to share one’s mind, one’s heart----”
“No,--no,--we draw the line there. I am a deep secret fellow! I could tolerate no twin of an inner consciousness to spy out my true soul.” Ducie was letting himself go in this badinage, and he had no meaning of a deeper intent than the surface of jest. “And I could undertake no such contract as to sympathize with Ran’s extravagant enthusiasms and silly sentimentalities.”
The attention of the group was focused on the speaker. None of them noticed the uprising conscious flare in the face of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney--except, indeed, her husband, who was quick, too, to recollect the significant fact that only she had had the keen discernment to detect the difference between this man and the twin brother of whom he seemed the counterpart.