“I beg your pardon, Mr. Mapleson,” she said, recovering herself somewhat, while she searched his face for something by which she could distinguish him from Geoffrey. “I perceive that I have made a mistake, but you so strangely resemble my—Mr. Geoffrey Huntress that I mistook you for him.”
She had been about to say “my brother,” but suddenly checked herself, for, since Geoffrey had shown so much of his heart to her and she had begun to analyze her own feelings toward him, she had been very shy about calling him brother.
“Ah! Mr. Geoffrey Huntress,” repeated Everet Mapleson, with a quick flash from his eyes, while his keen mind at once made a shrewd guess, and argued therefrom that this beautiful girl must be either the sister or the cousin of his enemy. “I have met that gentleman, for I also am a student at Yale,” he continued, “and—pardon my boldness—I presume I now have the pleasure of meeting his sister, Miss Huntress.”
“No, I am not his sister, Mr. Mapleson,” Gladys replied, her color coming and going in soft, little sunrise flushes, “but we are members of the same family, and I am Miss Huntress.”
“Ah, yes—excuse me—you are cousins, I presume. Huntress once told me that he was reared by an uncle. I am sorry, upon my word,” he went on, with an appealing look, “if our singular resemblance has caused you any annoyance to-day; pray think no more of it since it was a very natural mistake. We are often addressed by each other’s name—indeed, we are known at Yale as ‘the mysterious double.’”
All the time the young man was speaking he was closely observing the young girl.
He had noticed her fluctuating color when she spoke of Geoffrey; he remarked the tender inflection of her voice as she uttered his name, and how eager she had been to correct his mistake in supposing them to be brother and sister.
“They are cousins—perhaps not first cousins, either, and the girl loves him,” he said to himself. “Of course he returns her affection—no fellow in his senses could help it. I wonder how it would work if I should try my own luck in this direction. I have never paid off that old grudge against him, and this would be a fine way to settle it.”
But Gladys, all unconscious of this secret plotting against her own and Geoffrey’s happiness, looked up with a merry smile at his words to her, and remarked:
“The resemblance is surely very striking, although your voices are unlike. I knew the moment you spoke that I had made a mistake, and my apparent rudeness must have been quite startling to you,” she concluded, coloring again as she remembered how eagerly she had approached him and laid her hand upon his arm.