Next day Angelica, with an innocent air, gave Miss Apsley a long division
sum which she had completed during the night. It was done by an immense
number of figures, and covered four sheets of foolscap gummed together.
Miss Apsley worked at it for an hour to verify it, and, finding it quite
correct, she decided that Angelica knew long division enough, and must go
on to something else. Her first impression was that she had secured a
singularly apt pupil, and she was much surprised, when she began to teach
Angelica the next rule in arithmetic, to find that she could _not_
make the dear child see it. Angelica listened, and tried, with every
appearance of honest intention, getting red and hot with the effort; and
she would not put the slate down; she would go on trying till her head
ached, she was so eager to learn; but work as she might, she could do
nothing but long division. Miss Apsley said she had never known anything
so singular. Lady Adeline sighed.
For about a week, the twins "lay low."
The tutor had found it absolutely impossible to teach Diavolo anything.
The boy was perfectly docile. He would sit with his bright eyes riveted on
his master's face, listening with might and main apparently; but at the
end of every explanation the tutor found the same thing. Diavolo never had
the faintest idea of what he had been talking about.
At the end of a week, however, the children changed their tactics. When
lessons ought to have begun one morning Diavolo went to Miss Apsley, and
sat himself down beside her in Angelica's place, with a smiling
countenance and without a word of explanation; while Angelica presented
herself to the tutor with all Diavolo's books under her arm.
"Please, sir," she said, "there must have been some mistake. Diavolo and I
find that we were mixed somehow wrong, and I got his mind and he got mine.
I can do his lessons quite easily, but I can't do my own; and he can do
mine, but he can't do these"--holding up the books. "It's like this, you
see. I can't learn from a lady, and he can't learn from a man. So I'm
going to be your pupil, and he's going to be Miss Apsley's. You don't
understand twins, I expect. It's always awkward about them; there's so
often something wrong. With us, you know, the fact of the matter is that
_I_ am Diavolo and _he_ is me."
The tutor and governess appealed to Mr. Hamilton-Wells, and Mr.
Hamilton-Wells sent for the twins and lectured them, Lady Adeline sitting
by, seriously perplexed. The children stood to attention together, and
listened respectfully; and then went back to their lessons with
undeviating cheerfulness; but Diavolo did Angelica's, and Angelica did his
diligently, and none other would they do.
But this state of things could not continue, and in order to end it, Mr.
Hamilton-Wells had recourse to a weak expedient which he had more than
once successfully employed unknown to Lady Adeline. He sent for the twins,
and consulted their wishes privately.
"What do you want?" he asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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