“Met you before,” said Galahad with some terseness. “And you frightened me abominably by the way you scorched down Penniford Hill.”
The long-legged young man stared with circular blue eyes. Laura burst into a peal of rippling laughter, which struck Galahad as being forced and beside the point.
“My dear Galahad,” Mrs. Kingdom cried, “you must have met Brosy! This is Dosy,” she added, as though all were now clear, and welcomed with a perfect feu de joie of giggles the entrance of the veritable and original young man in gray tweeds who had driven the automobile, and now came strolling into the drawing-room. Then she introduced the pair formally to Captain Ranking as Mr. Theodosius and Mr. Ambrose Lasher, and rustled away to pour out tea, leaving Galahad in a jaundiced frame of mind. For one thing, he hated to be mystified; for another, being an ordinary, though heroic, human being, he had taken at the first moment of encounter a singularly ardent and sincere dislike to the “long-legged, blue-eyed young bounder,” as he mentally termed Mr. Brosy Lasher; and the discovery that the object of his loathing existed in duplicate was not a welcome one. He was dry, stiff, and jerky in his responses to the loud and patronizing advances of the two Lashers. Fortunately the twin young gentlemen accepted as admiration, what was, in fact, the opposite sentiment. They had been used to a good deal of this since the first moment of their simultaneous entrance upon this mundane stage, and they were twenty-six.
“It is so sad,” Laura said in confidential aside to Galahad. “They have lost both parents, and have hardly a penny in the world.” She raised and crumpled her still pretty eyebrows with the old infantile air of appeal. “Two such delightful boys, and so handsome! ... though to my eye Brosy’s nose is less purely Greek in outline than Dosy’s. And they were educated at a public school, with every advantage that a rich man’s sons might naturally expect. But, of course, you recognized the cachet of Eton at once?”
“I notice,” said Ranking drily, “that they both leave the lower button of their waistcoats undone, and call men whom they don’t like ‘scugs.’” His quiet eye dwelt with dubious tenderness upon the Messrs. Lasher, who were romping with the dogs upon the sofas, and devouring cake and strawberries with infantile greed. “I have heard of the Eton manner, of course,” he added, “and I meet a good many Eton-bred men; but I can’t say that these young fellows have any—any special characteristics in common with—ah—those.”
“They belong to a grand old family,” Laura continued, with an air of proprietorship that puzzled Galahad. “The Lashers of Dropshire, you know—quite historical. And their father ran through everything before they came of age. So thoughtless, wasn’t it? And now they are looking round for an opening in life, and really, they tell me, it is dreadfully difficult to find.”
“I rather imagined as much,” said Galahad, making a little point of sarcasm all to himself, and secretly smiling over it.
“I wonder if you could suggest anything; you are always so helpful,” Laura went on. “That they must be together, of course, goes without saying. And that, of course, increases the difficulty. But nobody could be so inhuman as to part twins.” Her lips quivered, and her eyes grew misty with unshed tears.
“My dear Laura,” expostulated the puzzled Galahad, “you talk as though these two young men were six years old instead of six-and-twenty.”
“How changed you are!” Laura blinked away a tear. “You used to understand me so much better in the old days. Of course, they are grown up, that is plain to the meanest capacity. But they have such boyish, charming, confiding natures.... Toto will bite, Brosy, if you hold him in the air by the tail!... that a woman like myself.... If you would like some more cherry cake, Dosy, do ring the bell!... a woman like myself, married at eighteen to a man true and noble if you will, but incapable of awakening the deeper chords of passion and.... Of course, you are both going to dine here and help me to entertain Captain Ranking!... denied the happiness of being a mother”—Laura drooped her eyes and bit her lip, and blushed slightly—“must naturally find their company a great resource. And the distant cousin with whom they are staying, a Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers, who has taken Eyot Cottage for the summer months, knows this and lends them to me as often as I like.”