"I am glad of that," said Mrs. Harrington; "because I expect you will see several other men in the same dress this evening." Mrs. Harrington had got up a party to go to the great naval ball of the season--a charity ball. Her party consisted of the Ingham-Bakers and the FitzHenrys, and for the first time for eight years the twin brothers met in the house in Grosvenor Gardens. They were at this moment in the dining-room together, where they had been left by their hostess with a kindly injunction to finish the port wine, duly tempered--as was all Mrs. Harrington's kindness--by instructions not to smoke. Agatha's feelings were rather mixed, so, like a wise young woman of the world, she read the evening paper with great assiduity and refused to think. The evening had been one of comparisons. Fitz and Luke had come together, for they were sharing rooms in Jermyn Street. Fitz, smart, upright, essentially a naval officer and an unquestionable gentleman. Luke, a trifle browner, more weather-beaten, with a faint, subtle suggestion of a rougher life. Fitz, easy, good-natured, calmly sure of himself--utterly without self-consciousness. Luke, conscious of inferior grade, not quite at ease, jealously on the alert for the comparison. And Agatha had known from the first moment that in the eyes of the world--and Mrs. Harrington looked through those eyes--there was no comparison. Fitz carried all before him. All except Agatha. The girl was puzzled. Luke could not be compared with Fitz, and the whole world did not compare with Luke. She was fully awake to the contradiction, and she could not reconcile her facts. She had been very properly brought up at the Brighton Boarding School, receiving a good, practical, modern, nineteenth-century education--a curriculum of solid facts culled from the latest school books, from which Love had very properly been omitted. And now, as she pretended to read the Globe Agatha was puzzling vaguely and numbly over the contradictions that come into human existence with the small adjunct called love. She was wondering how it was that she saw Luke's faults and the thousand ways in which he was inferior to his brother, and yet that with all these to stay him up Fitz did not compare with Luke. After all, there must have been some small defect in the education which she had received, for instead of thinking these futile things she ought to have been attempting to discover--as was her mother at that moment--which of the two brothers seemed more likely to inherit Mrs. Harrington's money. Agatha's thoughts went back to the moment on the deck of the Croonah, when the sea breeze swept over her and Luke, and the strength of it, the simple, open force, seemed to be part and parcel of him--of the strong arms around her in which she was content to lie quiescent. She wondered for a moment whether it had all been true.