Now you will understand better why I said to myself, with much sincerity: “I do hope they won’t be awkward and self-conscious. And I also must try not to be.” As the train approached Bedbury I had qualms. I had qualms about the advisability of this visit to the Vernons. How could it possibly succeed, with that memory stalking like a ghost in the garden near the front door of their delightful and hospitable house? How could----? Then we rumbled over the familiar bridge, and I saw the familiar station yard, and the familiar dog-cart, and the familiar Dalmatian dog, and the familiar white mare that was rather young and skittish when Lucy jilted me. “That mare must be rising seven now,” I thought, “and settled down in life.” I descried Mrs. Vernon waiting on the platform to welcome me, with the twins. Alas! I had forgotten the twins, those charming and frail little girls always dressed alike. Invariably, on my previous visits, I had brought something for the twins--a toy, a box of sweets, a couple of bead necklaces. Never once had I omitted to lay my tribute on the altar of their adorable infancy. And now I had forgotten, and my forgetfulness saddened me, because I knew that it would sadden them; they would expect, and they would be disappointed; they would taste the bitterness of life. “My poor little dears!” I thought, as they smiled and shouted, to see my head out of the carriage window, “I feel for you deeply.” This beginning was a bad one. Like all men who have suffered without having deserved to suffer, I was superstitious, and I felt that the beginning augured ill. I resigned myself, even before the train had quite stopped, to a constrained and bored week-end with the Vernons. “Well?” I exclaimed, with an affectation of jollity, descending from the carriage. “Well?” responded Mrs. Vernon, with the same affectation. It was lamentable, simply lamentable, the way in which that tragic memory stood between us and prevented either of us from showing a true, natural, simple self to the other. Mrs. Vernon could say little; I could say little; and what we did say was said stiffly, clumsily. Perhaps it was fortunate, on the whole, that the twins were present. They at any rate were natural and self-possessed. “And how old are you now?” I asked them. “We are seven,” they answered politely in their high, thin voices. “Then you are like the little girl’s family in Wordsworth’s poem,” I remarked.