“Yes,” he said; “and it was she who first put into our heads the notion of coming. She had been on a visit at Mudford once; and when she heard that Mr Mole’s practice was to be sold, an idea occurred to her. She suggested it to me, and we all talked it over between us, and at length determined to carry it out, my uncle being especially delighted with the plan, from a cunning feeling of pleasure at the trick itself, as well as from the prospect of escaping an advance of cash, and yet of the family avoiding the disgrace of Henry’s going to prison. The plan was, that I should buy Mr Mole’s practice, which did not require a large outlay, and that we should all come quietly down here together, making it at the same time be believed that Henry and his wife had escaped to the Continent. My brother and I being, as you see, very much alike, we thought that, by taking care not to go out together, nor to be seen at the same time—by trimming our beards and mustaches in precisely the same way, and by always wearing exactly the same kind of dress—we might cause it to be believed, especially by strangers, that we were one and the same person. My brother’s wife, almost ever since her marriage, had been an invalid, and was confined almost entirely to the house, so that there was no fear of our being found out through her; and for our housekeeper we chose an old servant of the family, on whose fidelity we could depend. There were several reasons which determined us on taking the proposed step. My brother’s wife was horrified at the idea of her husband being taken from her and sent to prison, and would have put up with anything rather than that; and Miss Playfair was coming down here again on a visit, so that we thought we should be able frequently to see each other—a thing which my uncle’s strange character, and the uncertainty of my prospects from him, made her parents rather object to at home. Besides this, my brother and I had jointly made some rather important discoveries in chemistry and electricity, and we wished to remain together in order to carry out a systematic course of experiments, and conjointly to write a work on the subject. More than all, as I said before, the notion took our uncle’s fancy so much, that he made quite a point of it, and we saw that we could not refuse to go on with the scheme without giving him the greatest offence, which, under the circumstances, we could not afford to do.