daughter was pretty—yes, distinctly pretty. She attracted Guy’s attention at once by the piercing keenness of her lustrous dark eyes, and the delicate olive-brown of her transparent complexion. Her expression was merry, but with a strange and attractive undertone, he thought, of some mysterious charm. A more taking girl, indeed, now he came to look close, he hadn’t seen for months. He congratulated himself on his garrulous old lady’s choice of a bench to sit upon, if it helped him to an introduction to the beautiful stranger.
But before he could even be introduced, the pretty girl with the olive-brown complexion had held out her hand to him frankly, and exclaimed in a voice as sunny as her face—
“I don’t need to be told your friend’s name, I’m sure, Mrs. Godfrey. He’s so awfully like him. I should have known him anywhere. Of course, you’re Mr. Waring’s brother, aren’t you?”
Guy smiled, and bowed gracefully; he was always graceful.
“I refuse to be merely MR. WARING’S BROTHER,” he answered, with some amusement, as he took the proffered hand in his own warmly. “If it comes to that, I’m Mr. Waring myself; and Cyril, whom you seem to know already, is only my brother.”
“Ah, but MY Mr. Waring isn’t here to-day, is he?” the olive-brown girl put in, looking around with quite an eager interest at the crowd in the distance. “Naturally, to me, he’s THE Mr. Waring, of course, and you are only MY Mr. Waring’s brother.”
“Elma, my dear, what on earth will Mr. Waring think of you?” her mother put in, with the conventional shocked face of British propriety. “You know,” she went on, turning round quickly to Guy, “we’re all so grateful to your brother for his kindness to our girl in that dreadful accident the other day at Lavington, that we can’t help thinking and talking of him all the time as our Mr. Waring. I’m sorry he isn’t here himself this afternoon to receive our thanks. It would be such a pleasure to all of us to give them to him in person.”
“Oh, he is about, somewhere,” Guy answered carelessly, still keeping his eye fixed hard on the pretty girl. “I’ll fetch him round by-and-by to pay his respects in due form. He’ll be only too glad. And this, I suppose, must be Miss Clifford that I’ve heard so much about.”
As he said those words, a little gleam of pleasure shot through Elma’s eyes. Her painter hadn’t forgotten her, then. He had talked much about her.
“Yes, I knew who you must be the very first moment I saw you,” she answered, blushing; “you’re so much like him in some ways, though not in all. … And he told me that day he had a twin brother.”
“So much like him in some ways,” Guy repeated, much amused. “Why, I wonder you don’t take me for Cyril himself at once. You’re the very first person I ever knew in my life, except a few old and very intimate friends, who could tell at all the difference between us.”
Elma drew back, almost as if shocked and hurt at the bare suggestion.
“Oh, dear no,” she cried quickly, scanning him over at once with those piercing keen eyes of hers; “you’re like him, of course—I don’t deny the likeness—as brothers may be like one another. Your features are the same, and the colour of your hair and eyes, and all that sort of thing; but still, I knew at a glance you weren’t my Mr. Waring. I could never mistake you for him. The expression and the look are so utterly different.”
“You must be a very subtle judge of faces,” the young man answered, still smiling, “if you knew us apart at first sight; for I never before in my life met anybody who’d seen my brother once or twice, and who didn’t take me for him, or him for me, the very first time he saw us apart. But then,” he added, after a short pause, with a quick dart of his eyes, “you were with him in the tunnel for a whole long day; and in that time, of course, you saw a good deal of him.”
Elma blushed again, and Guy noticed in passing that she blushed very prettily.
“And how’s Sardanapalus?” she asked, in a somewhat hurried voice, making an inartistic attempt to change the subject.
“Oh, Sardanapalus is all right,” Guy answered, laughing. “Cyril told me you had made friends with him, and weren’t one bit afraid of him. Most people are so dreadfully frightened of the poor old creature.”
“But he isn’t old,” Elma exclaimed, interrupting him with some warmth. “He’s in the prime of life. He’s so glossy and beautiful. I quite fell in love with him.”
“And who is Sardanapalus?” Mrs. Clifford asked, with a vague maternal sense of discomfort and doubt. “A dog or a monkey?”
“Oh, Sardanapalus, mother—didn’t I tell you about him?” Elma cried enthusiastically. “Why, he’s just lovely and beautiful. He’s such a glorious green and yellow-banded snake; and he coiled around my arm as if he’d always known me.”
Mrs. Clifford drew back with a horror-stricken face, darting across at her daughter the same stealthy sort of look she had given her husband the night after Elma’s adventure.
“A snake!” she repeated, aghast, “a snake! Oh, Elma! Why, you never told me that. And he coiled round your arm. How horrible!”
But Elma wasn’t to be put down by exclamations of horror.
“Why, you’re not afraid of snakes yourself, you know, mother,” she went on, undismayed. “I remember papa saying that when you were at St. Kitts with him you never minded them a bit, but caught them in your hands like an Indian juggler, and treated them as playthings, so I wasn’t afraid either. I suppose it’s hereditary.”
Mrs. Clifford gazed at her fixedly for a few seconds with a very pale face.
“I suppose it is,” she said slowly and stiffly, with an evident effort. “Most things are, in fact, in this world we live in. But I didn’t know YOU at least had inherited it, Elma.”
Just at that moment they were relieved from the temporary embarrassment which the mention of Sardanapalus seemed to have caused the party, by the approach of a tall and very handsome man, who came forward with a smile towards where their group was standing. He was military in bearing, and had dark brown hair, with a white moustache; but he hardly looked more than fifty for all that, as Guy judged at once from his erect carriage and the singular youthfulness of both face and figure. That he was a born aristocrat one could see in every motion of his well-built limbs. His mien had that ineffable air of grace and breeding which sometimes marks the members of our old English families. Very much like Cyril, too, Guy thought to himself, in a flash of intuition; very much like Cyril, the way he raised his hat and then smiled urbanely on Mrs. Clifford and Elma. But it was Cyril grown old and prematurely white, and filled full with the grave haughtiness of an honoured aristocrat.
“Why, here’s Colonel Kelmscott!” Mrs. Clifford exclaimed, with a sigh of relief, not a little set at ease by the timely diversion. “We’re so glad you’ve come, Colonel. And Lady Emily too; she’s over yonder, is she? Ah, well, I’ll look out for her. We heard you were to be here. Oh, how kind of you; thank you. No, Elma’s none the worse for her adventure, thank Heaven! just a little shaken, that’s all, but not otherwise injured. And this gentleman’s the brother of the kind friend who was so good to her in the tunnel. I’m not quite sure of the name. I think it’s—”
“Guy Waring,” the young man interposed blandly. Hardly any one who looked at Colonel Kelmscott’s eyes could even have perceived the profound surprise this announcement caused him. He bowed without moving a muscle of that military face. Guy himself never noticed the intense emotion the introduction aroused in the distinguished stranger. But Mrs. Clifford and Elma, each scanning him closely with those keen grey eyes of theirs, observed at once that, unmoved as he appeared, a thunderbolt falling at Colonel Kelmscott’s feet could not more thoroughly or completely have stunned him. For a second or two he gazed in the young man’s face uneasily, his colour came and went, his bosom heaved in silence; then he roped his moustache with his trembling fingers, and tried in vain to pump up some harmless remark appropriate to the occasion. But no remark