When, some time in July, Mrs. Carroll told me that she had invited her nephew and niece, Gerald and Katherine Dale, to come on a visit to Derryaghy, I became at once very curious to see them. I had never even heard of them before, and now I learned such interesting items as that they lived in London, were twins, and about my own age, or perhaps a year older, Mrs. Carroll could not remember. They arrived at the end of the month, and that night I went to dinner to meet them. As it happened, I was late. My watch had stopped for half an hour or so in the afternoon, and then gone on again, an annoying and foolish trick it occasionally played me. I was told they were already in the dining-room, but that dinner had only begun. The prospect of meeting strangers always produced in me an unconquerable shyness, and, to-night, partly because I was late, and partly because these particular strangers were so nearly my own age, my shyness was doubled. I did not look at either of them as I entered the room where, though daylight had not yet quite failed, two softly shaded lamps burned, amid a profusion of flowers, upon the white and silver table. I shook hands with my hostess and with Miss Dick, mumbling out apologies, and had begun a lengthy and involved description of the cause of my delay, when Mrs. Carroll cut me short by introducing me to the Dales. I shook hands with one and bowed to the other, blushing and incapable of finding a word. I should never have guessed they were even brother and sister, let alone twins, for in appearance they were utterly unlike. Katherine pleased me. She was fresh and bright and attractive; I even thought her beautiful, for there was something of the open air about her, something of nature. At any rate she gave me that impression; her beauty had a kind of grave simplicity; and, if I had been a poet, and had been describing her, all my similes would have been taken from nature, from open hill-sides, from the wind and the sky. As I sat down beside her, her clear, dark, very blue eyes rested on me frankly, and with that she suddenly set me puzzling over where I had seen her before, or whom she reminded me of. I kept glancing at her furtively, but, seen in profile, her face was no longer suggestive, and I decided I had made a mistake. She appeared to me friendly and candid and unaffected, but I doubted if she were clever. Her brother, on the other hand, probably _was_ clever. I did not take to him, he was smaller than she, thin and brown and subtle; also he had a way of looking at you that made you want to ask him what it was he found amusing. “Peter will be able to show you everything, and take you everywhere,” Mrs. Carroll explained, comprehensively, and then Katherine asked me if I played golf.