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Ada’s friend was seated weeping in the front hall surrounded by the others, when the mistress, fetched by Ada herself, and accompanied by Tod and Peter, descended to hold parley with P.C. Lee.

“I can’t understand it, ma’am,” concluded the policeman, after a long explanation, continually interrupted by Ada’s friend with such interpolations as: “Oh, a hawful voice, that mournful”—“Them was the very words,” etc.

During this recital Tod and Peter crept further and further into the background, nudging each other in the ecstasy occasioned by such an unexpected tribute to their histrionic powers.

But their mother knows her Stevenson—and the twins—so before the narrative was nearly finished she turned swiftly upon them, demanding sternly:

“Which of you was it?”

“Young varmints!” said P.C. Lee to Ada’s friend, as he escorted her home; “I might ’a’ knowed it was them. ’Tain’t the fust time I’ve come across ’em, neither....”

When the time came for those twins, Tod and Peter, to go to public school, their mother seriously considered the advisability of putting them into different “houses.” At first she thought that, perhaps, it might make for righteousness to separate them. But on hearing the subject mooted, they so whole-heartedly fell in with her opinion, rapturously reviewing the possibility of “changing houses” whenever they felt so inclined, that she instantly dismissed the idea; rightly coming to the conclusion that if their extraordinary resemblance was a cause of general muddle and mystification while they were together, it would become confusion worse confounded were they separated. Moreover, she reflected that even schoolmasters are men of like passions with ourselves, and rightly refrained from adding to such a one’s already heavy burden by a separate superintendence of the twins.