To Captain Galahad Ranking, grilling over his Musketry-Instructorship at Hounslow one arid July, came a square lilac envelope, addressed in a sprawling hand, with plenty of violet ink. The missive smelt of Rhine violets. It bore a monogram, the initials “L. K.” fantastically intertwined, and was, in fact, an invitation from his affectionate cousin Laura, dated from a pleasant country mansion situate amid green lawns and blushing rose-gardens on the Werkshire reaches of the Thames.

Laura was not Galahad’s cousin by blood, but by marriage. Laura was the still young and attractive widow of Thomson Kingdom, once a stout man on the Stock Exchange, remarkable for a head of very upright gray hair and a startling taste in printed linen. Pigs and peaches were his pet hobbies, and the apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied was induced by a weakness in “the City” caused by unprecedentedly heavy selling-orders from a nervous north-eastern European capital, about the time of the entente cordiale. So the bloom was barely off Laura’s crÊpe, and the new black gloves purchased by Galahad to grace his kinsman’s obsequies had not done duty at another funeral. The scrawly postscript to her letter said: “I want to consult you very particularly, in the most absolute confidence, upon a matter affecting my whole future.”

Galahad Ranking, Junior Captain, Fourth Battalion Royal Deershire Regiment, wrinkled up his freckled little countenance into queer puckers, and rubbed his bristly cinnamon-colored hair, already getting thin on the summit of his skull, as he puzzled the brain within that receptacle as to the possible meaning of Laura’s impassioned appeal. He was a small man, whose demure and spinster-like demeanor led new acquaintances to ask him plumply how on earth he had managed to get his D.S.O.

“There were chances,” he would reply to these querists, “to be had out there,” waving his hand vaguely in the direction of South Africa, “and I saw one of them and took it—that’s all.”

Others might pump him more successfully to the effect that he—Galahad Ranking—was a poor devil of a militiaman attached to the Royal Deershires; that a small detachment of that well-known territorial regiment, garrisoned in a beastly small tin-pot fort on the Springbok River, Eastern Transvaal, were by Boers besieged; that relief was urgently necessary; and that “one of the fellows went and brought up Kitchener.” Said fellow admitted upon further cross-examination to have been himself. But for such details as that the bringing up involved a six-mile run in scorching sun over tangled bush veldt, crossing the enemy’s lines, being sniped at by Boer sharpshooters and chased by Boer pickets, the curious must refer to despatches. Stampeding Army mules would not trample the truth out of the man.

He wrung half-hearted leave of absence from the powers that were, and his orderly packed the battered tin suit-case and the Gladstone bag that had spent three days at the bottom of a water-hole, and, having had its numerous labels soaked off, bore a painfully leprous appearance.

He found Laura’s omnibus automobile, with its luggage tender, waiting at Cholsford Junction, and smiled his dry little smile, mentally comparing the dimensions of the vehicle with the size of the guest. The suit-case and the Gladstone bag made a poor show; but there were other things to come: huge packages from the Stores, and a sea-weedy hamper from Great Fishby, and some cases of champagne with the label of a first-class Regent Street firm. “Poor Kingdom’s wine-merchants!” Ranking said to himself, and he blinked in a bewildered way at a bandbox of mammoth proportions and three dressmakers’ boxes of stout cardboard with tin corners, their covers bearing the flourishing signature of Babin et Cie. Because, you know, Laura’s bereavement was so very recent, and bachelors of Galahad’s type have a somewhat exaggerated notion of the extent to which conjugal mourners are expected to bewail themselves. However, even a widow requires clothes. This handsome concession to feminine idiosyncrasy made, Galahad ousted Laura’s chauffeur from the driving-seat, and, assuming the steering-wheel, was reaching for the starting-lever when the chauffeur stopped him with—

“Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a gentleman to fetch.”

“A visitor to The Rodelands?” Galahad asked, with furrows of surprise forming below his hat-brim.

The mechanic, a gloomy young man in a gold-banded cap, with a weakness for wearing waterproofs in the driest weather, replied, without a groom’s alertness or a groom’s civility:

“It’s a gentleman staying at Eyot Cottage....” Adding, as Galahad faintly recalled the creeper-covered cot in question, modestly perched on the edge of a marshy lawn running down to the river, and usually let by the landlord of the local hotel to honeymooning couples: “And we usually give him a lift.”

As the chauffeur spoke, the gentleman emerged from the dim, echoing archway through which the down platform disgorged. The stranger was young—Galahad, who was middle-aged, saw that at a glance—and fair, while Galahad was sandy. He wore a suit of gray tweeds too short in the sleeves and trouser-legs, and his cherubically pink countenance, adorned with large, round, china-blue eyes and a little flaxen mustache, was carried at an altitude which would have been disconcerting to a Lifeguardsman of six feet high, and was simply maddening to Galahad, who could only be categorized as small. We are all human, and Galahad was secretly gratified to observe that the young giant’s shoulders boasted a graceful droop, and that his chest was somewhat narrow.

“Hullo, Watson!” observed the tall young gentleman, condescendingly; and Watson smiled faintly and actually touched his cap as the new-comer favored Galahad with a long and round-eyed stare.

“I believe you are coming with us?” said Galahad, raising his hat with punctilious politeness.

“Not inside, thanks,” was the long-legged young stranger’s reply. He stared harder than ever, and Watson murmured in Galahad’s ear that the gentleman usually drove.

“Does he?” ejaculated the astonished Galahad.

A man may hold the rank of captain in one of his Majesty’s territorial Regiments, and yet be shy; may have earned the right to adorn his thorax with the D.S.O., and yet be bashful; may be a more than efficient instructor in Musketry, and yet shrink from the gratuitous schooling of underbred youth in the amenities of good breeding. In less time than it takes to relate it, Galahad was stowed in the omnibus body of the “Runhard” where, a very little kernel in a very roomy shell, he rattled about as the familiar landscape reeled giddily by at the will and pleasure of the long-legged young gentleman, who might be described as the kind of driver that takes risks. A peculiarly steep and curving hill announced by signboards lettered, in appropriate crimson, “Dangerous!” afforded facilities for the exercise of his peculiar talent which temporarily deprived the inside passenger of breath.

The river lay at the bottom of the hill, and the dwelling of Mrs. Kingdom, described in the local guide as “an elegant riparian villa,” sat in its green meadows and sunny croquet lawns and rose-trellised gardens, on the other side.

The automobile swirled in at the lodge-gates, stopped, and Galahad got out, welcomed by the joyful barking of Dinmonts, fox-terriers, pugs, and poodles.

Knee-deep in dogs, the little man responded to the respectful greeting of Laura’s butler, a meek, gray-faced, little, elderly personage with a frill of white whiskers akin to the hirsute adornments of the rare variety of the howling ape. Then the drawing-room door swung open, letting out an avalanche of Pomeranians and some Persian cats; Laura rose from a sofa and advanced with a gushful greeting. Her outstretched hands were grasped by Galahad; he was tinglingly conscious that her widow’s weeds were eminently becoming.

“Dear Captain Ranking, how sweet of you to run down!” Laura cooed. The flash of admiration in Galahad’s weary gray eyes gave her sugared assurance that she was looking her best; his ardent squeeze confirmed the look.

“You used to call me by my Christian name,” he was saying, with a little undulating wobble of sentiment in his voice. Then his glance went past Mrs. Kingdom, and his lean under-jaw dropped. The long-legged gentleman in gray tweed, who had driven, or rather hustled, him from the station, was sitting on the sofa in a suit of blue serge. No, Galahad was not mistaken. There were the long legs, the champagne-bottle shoulders, the china-blue eyes, and the little flaxen mustache. He did not look so pink, that was all. And when Laura, with a nervous giggle, introduced him as Mr. Lasher, he began getting up from the sofa as though he never would have done.

“How do?” he said, when his yellow head had soared to the ceiling.

“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.”

“Upon my word, she is uncommonly kind!” said Galahad, with emphasis stronger than Laura’s italics.

“Yes, isn’t she?” responded Laura, whose sense of humor was obscured by predilection. “They ride and drive the horses, and give Holt and the gardeners advice, and they exercise the automobiles, and run the electric launch about, and play tennis and croquet——”

“And the devil generally!” were the words that Galahad bit off and gulped down.

He was very quiet at dinner, sitting in the deceased Kingdom’s place at the foot of the table. And Dosy and Brosy were very loud and very large, though looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly well in evening garb. They made themselves very much at home upon Laura’s right and left hand, recommending certain dishes to each other, criticizing more, ravaging the bonbons, reveling in the dessert, calling, with artless airs of connoisseurship, for special wines laid down by the noble man who yet had not known how to awaken the deeper chords of passion.

“Gad! what a pair of hawbucks!” Galahad mentally ejaculated as the servants ran about like distracted ants, and Laura and Laura’s inseparable though elderly companion-friend, Miss Glidding, vied with each other in encouraging Theodosius and Ambrose to renewed attacks upon the strawberries and peaches.

Left alone with Dosy and Brosy, he submitted to be patronized, offered cigars he had chosen, recommended to try liqueurs with whose liverish and headachy qualities he had been acquainted of old.

They walked with the ladies in the dewy rose-gardens after dinner, and as Galahad paused to light a cigar, behold, he was left alone. Laura with Brosy, Miss Glidding (who looked her best by bat-light) with Dosy, had vanished in the shadowy windings of the trellis-walks and arcades. And Captain Ranking, shrugging his shoulders, picked a half-seen Niphetos, glimmering among the wet, shining leaves, and walked back to the smoking-room, wondering why on earth Laura had dragged him down where he seemed least to be wanted. What was the matter “affecting her whole future” upon which she required advice? His heart gave a sickening little jog as he realized that the future of Dosy, or possibly of Brosy, might also be involved. True, Laura was thirty-nine; but what are years when the heart is young? Galahad asked himself, as peal after peal of the widow’s laughter broke the silence of the scented night. Other mental interrogations fretted his aching brain. What must the servants not have thought and said? What would the neighbors say? What would the County think of such sportive, not to say frivolous, conduct on the part of a widow but recently emancipated from weepers, whose handkerchiefs were still bordered with the inch-deep inky deposit of conjugal woe?

Kingdom was an easy-going, level-headed man, Galahad admitted, biting at one of the deceased’s Havanas and frowning; “but he would have raised the Devil over this. Possibly he’s doing it.”

The portrait of Mr. Kingdom over the mantelshelf of the smoking-room seemed to scowl confirmatively. The servants were all in bed, the promenaders in the garden showed no signs of returning. Galahad shrugged his little shoulders, and went away to bed in a charming, drum-windowed, chintz-hung bower over the front porch. And just as his little cropped head plumped down on the pillow it was electrically jolted up again. Laura was saying good-night in the porch to one—or was it both?—of the infernal twins. And before the hall-door clashed they had promised to come over to lunch to-morrow. Confound them! it was to-morrow now.

One has only to add that when, after exhausting watches, slumber visited Galahad’s eyelids, the twins in maddening iteration played dominoes throughout his dreams, to convince the reader that they had thoroughly got upon his nerves.

Laura, looking wonderfully fresh and young in a lace morning nÉgligÉ of the peek-a-boo description, poured out his coffee at breakfast and sympathized with him about the headache he denied. Then, shaded by a fluffy black-and-white sunshade, the widow led Galahad out into the sunny garden to a tree-shaded and sequestered nook where West Indian hammocks hung, and, installing herself in one of these receptacles, invited her husband’s cousin to repose himself in another.

Lying on your back, counting ripening plums dangling from green branches above, oscillating at the bidding of the lightest breeze, liable to upset at the slightest movement, it is difficult to be indignant and sarcastic; but Galahad was both.

“Adopt these young men as sons, my dear Laura! Are there no parentless babies in the local workhouse that would better supply the need you express of having something to cherish and love?” exclaimed Galahad.

He sat up with an effort and stared at Laura. Laura rocked, prone amid cushions, knitting a silk necktie of a tender hue suited to a blonde complexion.

“Workhouse babies are invariably ugly, and unhealthy into the bargain,” she pouted.

“Some orphan child from a Home, that is pretty to look at and has had the distemper properly,” suggested Galahad.

“I don’t want an orphan from a Home,” objected Laura. “Besides, it wouldn’t be a twin.”

“There are such things as twin orphans, my dear Laura,” protested Galahad.

But Laura was firm.

“Dosy and Brosy are very, very dear to me,” she protested, a little pinkness about the eyelids and nostrils threatening an impending tear-shower. “They came into my life,” she continued poetically, “at a time of sorrow and bereavement, and the sunshine of their presence drove the dark clouds away. Of course, they are too old, or, rather, not young enough, to be really my sons,” she continued, “but they might have been poor Tom’s.”

“If poor Tom had fathered a brace of bounders like those,” burst out Galahad, “poor Tom would have kicked himself—that’s all I know—kicked himself!” he repeated, fuming and climbing out of his hammock.

“Pray don’t be coarse,” entreated Laura—“and abusive,” she added, as an afterthought. “Of course, as poor Tom’s trustee and executor, I am bound to make a show of consulting you, though my mind is really made up, and nobody can prevent my doing what I like with my own income. I shall allow the boys five hundred a year each for pocket money,” she added with a pretty maternal air. “And Dosy shall go into the Diplomatic Service, and Brosy——”

“You have broached the adoption plan to them then?” gasped Galahad. Laura bowed her head. “And this relative with whom I gather they are now staying,” he continued, “is she agreeable to the proposed arrangement?”

“Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers? She couldn’t prevent it if she wasn’t!” retorted Laura, “as the boys are of age. But, as it happens, she thinks the plan an ideal one.”

“That proves the value of her judgment, certainly. And the County? Will your friends and neighbors also think the plan an ideal one?” demanded Galahad.

“My friends and neighbors,” said Laura, loftily, “will think as I do, or they will cease to be my friends.”

Galahad, usually punctiliously well-mannered, whistled long and dismally. “Phew! And when you have alienated every soul upon your visiting list, what will you do for society?”

“I shall have the boys,” said Laura, with defiant tenderness.

“And when the ‘boys,’ as you call them, marry?” insinuated Galahad.

Laura sat up so suddenly that all her cushions rolled out of the hammock. “If this is how you treat me when I turn to you for advice——” she began.

“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.

It was September. Dosy and Brosy were shooting the widow’s partridges, and Galahad found her alone. She was pleased and excited, with an air of one who with difficulty keeps the cork in a bottle of mystery; and when she clasped her hands round Galahad’s arm and told him what a true, true friend he was! he felt absurdly tender, as he begged her to confide her trouble to him.

“I have made such a dreadful discovery,” Laura gasped, dabbing her eyes with a filmy little square of cambric edged with the narrowest possible line of black, “about the—about the boys.”

Galahad strove to compose his features into an expression of decent regret.

“Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Theodosius Lasher.... I rather anticipated that you—that possibly there were discoveries to be made.” He turned his weary gray eyes upon Laura, and pulled at one wiry end of his little gingery mustache. “Have they done anything very bad?” he asked, and his tone was not uncheerful.

“Bad!” echoed Laura, with indignant scorn. “As though two young men gifted with natures like theirs”—she had left off calling them “boys,” Galahad noticed—“so lofty, so noble, so unselfish—and yes, I will say it, so pure!—could possibly be guilty of any bad or even doubtful action. But you do not know them, and you are prejudiced; you must admit you are prejudiced when you hear the—the truth.” The cork escaped, and the secret came with it in a gush. “It is this: I cannot be a mother to Dosy and Brosy; they, poor dears, cannot be my sons. I had not the least idea of their true feeling with regard to me, nor had they, until quite recently.” She swallowed a little sob and dabbed her eyes again. “Oh, Galahad, they are madly in love with me, both of them. What, what am I to do?”

“Send them to the devil, the impudent young beggars!” snorted Galahad. And, striding up and down between the trembling china-tables with clenched fists and angry eyes, he said all the things he had longed to say about folly, and madness and infatuation.

A woman will always submit with a good grace to masculine upbraiding when she has reason to believe the upbraider jealous. Laura bore his reproaches with saintly sweetness.

“They have behaved in the most honorable way, poor darlings!” she protested, “though the realization of the true nature of their feelings towards me, of course, came as a terrible shock. The deeds of settlement had been drawn up. We planned, as soon as everything had been sealed and signed, that the dear boys were to come and live here. I had furnished their bedrooms exactly alike, and fitted up the smoking-room with twin armchairs, twin tobacco-tables, and so on, when the blow fell.” She deepened her voice to a thrilling whisper. “Dosy, looking quite pale and tragic, asked for an interview in the conservatory; Brosy begged for a private word in the pavilion at the end of the upper croquet-lawn. And then,” said Laura, shedding abundant tears, “I knew what I had done. It did occur to me that I might—might marry Brosy and adopt Dosy as my son, or marry Dosy and regard Brosy as an heir. But no, it could not be. Dosy proposed to take poison, or shoot himself, in the most unselfish way; and Brosy suggested going in for a swim too soon after breakfast, and never rising from a dive again. But neither could endure to live to see me the bride of the other,” sobbed Laura.

“And as this is England, and not Malabar,” uttered Galahad, dryly, “the law is against your marrying both.”

“Why, of course, my dear Galahad,” cried Laura innocently, scandalized and round-eyed.

The man who really loved her looked at her and forgave her foolishness. She had set the County buzzing with the tale of her absurd infatuation; she had compromised her dignity by the tragic follies of the past few months; there was but one way of gagging the scandalmongers and regaining lost ground, one way of getting out of the impasse. Galahad pointed out that way, as Laura entreated him to suggest something.

“Why not marry me?” he said bluntly.

“Oh, Galahad!” cried Laura, bright-eyed and quite pleasantly thrilled. “And then we can both adopt the boys.”

“Whether they embrace that idea or not,” said Galahad, with his arm round the long-coveted waist, “remains to be seen. But I promise you, if occasion should arise, that I will act as a father to them.”

He went out, in his new parental character, to look for Dosy and Brosy and break the joyful news. His freckled little face was beaming with smiles, his usually weary gray eyes were alight; he smiled under his bristly little mustache as he selected a stout but stinging Malacca cane from the late Thompson Kingdom’s collection in the hall....