“Laura,” said Galahad firmly, “you don’t want advice.” He held up his lean brown hand and checked her, as she would have spoken. “Nor do you require twin sons of six feet three. What you want is——” He was going in his innocence to say “a sincere and candid friend,” and prove himself the ideal by some plain speaking, but Laura fairly brimmed over with conscious blushes.
“How—how can you?” she said, in vibrating tones of reproach, devoid of even a shade of anger. “So soon, too! As if I did not know what was due to poor Tom——”
The toot of a motor-horn, the scuffle of the engine, the dry whirr of the brake as the locomotive stopped at the avenue gate, broke in upon her heroics.
“Here are the boys,” she cried rapturously, and, indeed, hopped out of the hammock with the agility of girlhood as the long-legged, yellow-haired twins came stalking over the grass. She held out her hands to them with a pretty maternal gesture.
“Dosy pet, Brosy darling,” she babbled, “come and kiss Mummy! We have been telling all our little plans to Uncle Galahad, and Uncle quite agrees.”
“No! Does he, though?” was the simultaneous utterance of the long-legged twins. They twirled their yellow mustaches, stooped awkwardly and “kissed Mummy,” as Galahad uttered a yell of frenzied laughter, and, throwing himself recklessly into his recently-vacated hammock, shot out upon the other side.
He went back to Hounslow that day. Dosy and Brosy dutifully accompanied him to the station, and exchanged a fraternal wink when his train steamed out.
“What an infatuation!” he groaned. In his mind’s eye he saw the County grinning over the childless widow and her adopted twins. As for Dosy and Brosy, they would have what in America is termed “a soft snap.” Powerful jaws had both the young gentlemen, wide and greedy gullets. Still, with his mind’s eye Galahad saw their foolish, affectionate, sentimental benefactress gnawed to the bare bone. Day by day he anticipated a letter of shrill astonishment from his cotrustee, and when it came, hinting at mental weakness and the necessity of restraint, he flamed up into defense of Laura so hotly as to surprise himself.
And then, before anything decisive had been done with regard to the settlement—before Brosy and Dosy had taken up their quarters for good beneath the roof of their adopted parent—a change befell, and Galahad received an imploring note from Mrs. Kingdom soliciting his instant presence upon “an urgent matter.”
“She has thought better of it,” said Galahad to himself, as he obeyed the summons. “Her native good sense”—you will realize that the man must have been genuinely in love to believe in Laura’s native good sense—“has come to her aid!” And in his mind’s eye he beheld the long, narrow backs of the twins walking away into a dim perspective.