X. The Twin Brothers
IN a lone house in a northern county of Ireland the two brothers dwelt together. Smoothly and quietly their two lives had run side by side for nearly forty years. Bound together by natures modelled without contradictions, with nothing to disturb the deep, and to them yet unknown, emotions that slept in the heart of each, they were content to let year after year pass by them and their solitary life, so that those years left them peace. Their various visits to the big cities for education, and later on for business purposes, had given them no desire to leave the loneliness they loved. Twin brothers!—their characters, like their faces, seemed almost alike at first meeting them; after a time the difference struck the observer more forcibly, the ruggedness in the one brother being softened in the other. Where the blue eyes would speak of possibilities, of
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