"Let's differentiate our names somehow," said the pleasant-voiced one lazily--"Did your godfathers, etc., do anything more for you than Edward--mine didn't." The other shook his head. Something in his handsome face had already differentiated itself from the amused curiosity on his companion's. "That's awkward--we shall be driven to abbreviations. You shall be Ted, and I Ned--both dentals but philologically uninterchangeable; so they'll do for the present. Well, Ted, since you are twenty-seven and I'm gone twenty-nine, and my father died before I was born, we can't be complicated up as long--lost brothers--can we?" Ted turned to him frowning sharply--"No! but--but what put that into your head. I----" Ned laughed; a laugh as musical as his voice, but with a quaint aloofness about it as if he himself were standing aside to listen. "The position is--romantic; and novels have it so always. As if it were not frankly impossible in this England of ours to dissociate one man from another by breed--we're hopeless mongrels, kin to each other all round. Birth counts for nothing; so let's quit it--Upbringing?" Ted interrupted shortly--"I--I never knew my father, and my mother died when I was born." "So did mine," said Ned softly. There was a pause in which the luring wail of a circling plover who deemed the intruders too near her nest, became insistent, and seemed to fill the mountain solitude with a sense of motherhood, until, once more, the musical, critical laugh struck in on it. "'Come!' as Shakespeare says, 'there's sympathy for you!' So far we start fair. Education?--I was at Eton, and----" "I was a Blue-Coat boy," interrupted Ted again, and something in his tone made Ned look the other way, and idly busy himself in trying to dissociate a tender trail of ivy-leaved mountain campanula from its coarser companions in the turf. "A better education, I expect," he said at last, "though I admit the yellow stockings must be devilish; still"--he paused, settled himself yet more comfortably in his cleft, and with clasped hands behind his head, relapsed into smoke and silence. Even the plover, convinced of their innocence, had ceased her wheeling, luring wail. So desultorily, sometimes in thought only, sometimes by question and answer, they sat trying to dissociate themselves from the tie of a common name. And before them the afternoon sun, slowly sinking towards extinction in the sea, began to send level rays of light to fill up the valley with a golden haze in which all things lost their individuality. Finally Ned sat up, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "About equal, I should say; except, of course, for money." "That means we are unequal in all things," remarked Ted shortly. "You can't deny it. A clerk as I am, out for a Whitsun holiday with ten pounds to spend on it in his pocket, isn't--isn't in the same week with--well! what shall I say----" "A man who employs clerks," suggested Ned with a smile.