“But you mustn’t be afraid!” cried Mrs. Omroy Pont. “Now, my dear Duke, I want you particularly to come to this party because there is someone who wants to meet you, someone very lovely, positively I am not pulling your leg----” “Really this is too much!” the Duke muttered, coldly saying out aloud: “Dear Mrs. Omroy Pont, you do me great honour but I am afraid that an extremely previous and decidedly prior engagement----” “It is Miss Ava Lamb who wants to meet you, my dear Duke. She has just come over to Paris. Dinner is at nine. Thank you, thank you. It will be such fun. You will not have to talk unless you want to and you may go to sleep just when you like as I have engaged Mr. Cherry-Marvel to conduct the conversation over dinner. At nine then, my dear Duke.” V The Duke, as he fairly acknowledged to himself the morning after Mrs. Omroy Pont’s party, had been diverted beyond all expectation by his meeting with Miss Lamb. While she, candour compelled him to admit, hadn’t seemed any less sensible to the pleasant quality of their companionship. A beautiful girl, a sensible girl, with a lively interest in the passing moment and a delicious capacity for deriving pleasure from the twists in conversation which came so naturally to the Duke but were become, it has to be confessed, a shade familiar to his friends. She hadn’t, he reflected over his morning coffee, said anything throughout the evening that didn’t interest and entertain; and, since she had come to Europe for the first time but the other day, had amused him vastly with her impressions, which weren’t by any means all favourable, since Miss Lamb confessed to a taste for simplicity; which was very agreeable to the Duke, who was also wealthy. All this made very pleasant thinking for the Duke over his morning coffee; but had he consulted his memory more carefully, it might have emerged that Miss Lamb had listened with pretty attention the while he had talked, the matter of his talk seldom being so abstract in nature that she couldn’t entirely grasp it by just looking at him. What, of course, had instantly impressed him, as it impressed all who knew the Duchess, was the amazing resemblance between the sisters; since the fact that twins are very frequently as alike as two peas never does seem to prepare people for the likeness between the twins they actually meet. Now between Miss Lamb and the Duchess of Mall there wasn’t, you dared swear, so much as a shadow of difference in grace of line and symmetry of feature. But why, as Ava Lamb sensibly protested, why on earth should there be or need there be or could there be, since Leonora and she had been twins as punctually to the second as was possible?