eason I should not have a brother? He is a
doctor like myself, and shares my prejudices."

"Those prejudices don't affect my sister," I took courage to remark.

"They should. No decent woman can afford to despise the prejudices of a
decent man. The place of a young and beautiful woman is not----"

"I did not tell you she was young or beautiful. I--she--we are thirty
years old; and 'pretty,' 'interesting,' 'fine-looking,' are the most
complimentary epithets which have ever been applied to us."

"We don't all see with the same eyes," the man said.

It was on our last evening that I sate on a chair in the hotel gardens;
he came and smoked his cigar beside me.

"You go to-morrow?" he said.

I nodded.

"And you don't purpose to tell me where you go?"

I shook my head. How can I have him coming to my place with that story
of my sister--?

"So here, for ever, we say good-bye. I go back to my practice in
Sydney; and you----?"

I said nothing to fill up the pause.

"Four days!" he mused, and was silent.

The band was playing on the pier; the strains of that pretty thing
Hayden Coffin sings in _The Greek Slave_ came sorrowfully to us across
the sea and the sand. The people in their smart seaside costumes went
trooping past.

"Not a face I know in all these thousands," he said, and waved the hand
which held the cigar to include pier, parade, beach. "Not a face known
to you. Under such circumstances two people get to know each other in
four days as well as in years of ordinary intercourse. When I say
good-bye to you, I shall feel that I am parting with a very dear
friend. A friend I shall hardly know how to replace, or even to live
without. After four days! Absurd, is it not?"

"May I tell you about my brother?" This was after a long pause, during
which I had been inwardly shrinking from the dreary struggle before me,
and wishing--wishing--wishing that life was all holiday. "He is my twin
brother. Curious, isn't it? You don't think so? Oh, of course we know
there are twin brothers as well as twin sisters; but--. Still, let me
tell you a rather curious fact with regard to him.

"The night before that morning when I had the happiness to meet you, he
was staying in this hotel--he left by that convenient train before
breakfast, you know, the early one--and he had a strange experience. He
was lying awake in bed--the moon was very bright, it was that which
kept him awake--when the door of his room opened, and a woman,