“Elma, my dear, what on earth will Mr. Waring think of you?” her mother put in, with the conventional shocked face of British propriety. “You know,” she went on, turning round quickly to Guy, “we’re all so grateful to your brother for his kindness to our girl in that dreadful accident the other day at Lavington, that we can’t help thinking and talking of him all the time as our Mr. Waring. I’m sorry he isn’t here himself this afternoon to receive our thanks. It would be such a pleasure to all of us to give them to him in person.”
“Oh, he is about, somewhere,” Guy answered carelessly, still keeping his eye fixed hard on the pretty girl. “I’ll fetch him round by-and-by to pay his respects in due form. He’ll be only too glad. And this, I suppose, must be Miss Clifford that I’ve heard so much about.”
As he said those words, a little gleam of pleasure shot through Elma’s eyes. Her painter hadn’t forgotten her, then. He had talked much about her.
“Yes, I knew who you must be the very first moment I saw you,” she answered, blushing; “you’re so much like him in some ways, though not in all.... And he told me that day he had a twin brother.”
“So much like him in some ways,” Guy repeated, much amused. “Why, I wonder you don’t take me for Cyril himself at once. You’re the very first person I ever knew in my life, except a few old and very intimate friends, who could tell at all the difference between us.”
Elma drew back, almost as if shocked and hurt at the bare suggestion.
“Oh, dear no,” she cried quickly, scanning him over at once with those piercing keen eyes of hers; “you’re like him, of course—I don’t deny the likeness—as brothers may be like one another. Your features are the same, and the colour of your hair and eyes, and all that sort of thing; but still, I knew at a glance you weren’t my Mr. Waring. I could never mistake you for him. The expression and the look are so utterly different.”
“You must be a very subtle judge of faces,” the young man answered, still smiling, “if you knew us apart at first sight; for I never before in my life met anybody who’d seen my brother once or twice, and who didn’t take me for him, or him for me, the very first time he saw us apart. But then,” he added, after a short pause, with a quick dart of his eyes, “you were with him in the tunnel for a whole long day; and in that time, of course, you saw a good deal of him.”
Elma blushed again, and Guy noticed in passing that she blushed very prettily.
“And how’s Sardanapalus?” she asked, in a somewhat hurried voice, making an inartistic attempt to change the subject.