The Duchess looked from one to the other:
"What have you two been doing? What is the joke?"
With an air of preternatural solemnity the Duke took two letters from the breast-pocket of his coat.
"Mabel, you have already seen your letter. You have already seen the lock of your hair. Just look at this--and that."
He gave her the two very singular communications which had arrived in such a mysterious manner, and so quickly one after the other. She read them with wide-open eyes.
"Hereward! Wherever did these come from?"
The Duke was standing with his legs apart, and his hands in his trousers-pockets. "I would give--I would give another five hundred pounds to know. Shall I tell you, madam, what I have been doing? I have been presenting five hundred golden sovereigns to a perfect stranger, with a top-hat, and a gardenia in his button-hole."
"Whatever for?"
"If you have perused those documents which you have in your hand, you will have some faint idea. Ivor, when its your funeral I'll smile. Mabel, Duchess of Dachet, it is beginning to dawn upon the vacuum which represents my brain that I've been the victim of one of the prettiest things in practical jokes that ever yet was planned. When that fellow brought you that card at Cane and Wilson's--which, I need scarcely tell you, never came from me--some one walked out of the front entrance who was so exactly like you that both Barnes and Moysey took her for you. Moysey showed her into the carriage, and Barnes drove her home. But when the carriage reached home it was empty. Your double had got out upon the road."
The Duchess uttered a sound which was half a gasp, half sigh: