A nearer view, however, discovered a deal of difference between the sisters: in those small gestures of voice, habits of expression, capacity for attention and the like, which, so the Duke had warmly said, contribute far more than actual looks to mark the difference between one woman and another. Nor were they less dissimilar in colouring, for whereas both the Duchess and Miss Lamb had those small white faces and immense blue eyes generally affected by American ladies for the conquest of Europe, the Duchess’s hair was of a rich and various auburn shaded here to the deep lights of Renaissance bronze and there to the glow of Byzantine amber--the Duchess’s hair was, in fact, fair to fairish, while Miss Lamb’s was as near black as is proper in anyone with blue eyes who is without Irish blood. In the course of the ball that inevitably followed Mrs. Omroy Font’s dinner-party the Duke had had further opportunity of judging the differences between his wife and her beautiful sister. And presently he had thought it only fair to tell Miss Lamb that he and her sister had decided, for each their sakes, to break their marriage; and he had thought it only fair to himself to point his confession with a sigh, a sigh which he explained, after a silence quite beautifully bridged by an understanding look from her, as being forced from him by the fact that there was no pleasing some women. “You mustn’t for a moment think,” he’d added wretchedly, “that I am trying to enlist your sympathy against your own sister, but----” “Please!” Miss Lamb had protested quite unhappily to that. And here was another and the sweetest difference of all between the sisters, for Miss Lamb’s was the prettiest American accent imaginable, whereas the Duchess had long since and all too completely achieved the cold and ironic monotony of the mother-tongue. To be with Ava Lamb, the Duke had gratefully reflected at that moment, was to look on all the beauty of his wife in atmospheric conditions undisturbed by his wife’s sarcastic habit of mind. Miss Lamb hadn’t a touch of that irony and sophistication which is so often mistaken by American ladies for European culture, she was perfectly that rarest of all visitors to a bored continent, a fresh and simple American lady. And “Please!” was all she had said about her sister! But to the young Duke that one word had meant so much, forced as it had been so unhappily from her lips, as if half to shield her pert sister against the consequences of her folly, half to prevent him from seeing how deeply she disapproved of that sister, and wholly and sweetly to stay his tongue from exploring further into that misguided sister’s character--it had meant so much that he had been content to wait on her understanding even before she’d quietly added: “Oh, I understand----” “But do you, do you?” he had cried emphatically, and she had let silence present him anew with her deep sense of understanding. She had a delicious talent for silence.