"Cecil, this lady appears to be a friend of yours. Where are her thirty pounds?"
Cecil stepped up to him. "What confounded tricks have you been up to?"
Hubert's air of injured innocence was, in its way, superb.
"Cecil, this is too much; too much! In mistake for you I have been insulted, all but murdered, and all"--he turned to the assembled company--"and all, upon my word of honour, because I was so unfortunate as to have been born a twin."
[A VISION OF THE NIGHT.]
CHAPTER I.
ASLEEP.
"Charlie, do you believe in dreams?"
It was in the great hall of the Pouhon spring at Spa. The band was playing. The motley crowd which gathers in the season at Spa to drink, or not to drink, the waters, were talking, smoking, drinking coffee, something stronger, looking at the papers, or listening to the music. Among the crowd were Gerald Lovell and his friend Charles Warren. At the particular moment in which Mr. Lovell put his question, Mr. Warren was puffing rings of cigarette smoke into the air.
"Ask me," he said, with distinct irreverence, "another."