him on a
false charge of lunacy; and telling in what manner he had broken his
bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely
surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had been within the
convent.

AEgeon seeing his son, concluded this was the son who had left him to
go in search of his mother and his brother; and he felt secure that
this dear son would readily pay the money demanded for his ransom.
He therefore spoke to Antipholis in words of fatherly affection,
with joyful hope that he should now be released. But to the utter
astonishment of AEgeon, his son denied all knowledge of him, as well he
might, for this Antipholis had never seen his father since they were
separated in the storm in his infancy; but while the poor old AEgeon
was in vain endeavouring to make his son acknowledge him, thinking
surely that either his griefs and the anxieties he had suffered had so
strangely altered him that his son did not know him, or else that he
was ashamed to acknowledge his father in his misery; in the midst of
this perplexity, the lady abbess and the other Antipholis and Dromio
came out, and the wondering Adriana saw two husbands and two Dromios
standing before her.

And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all, were
clearly made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholises and the two
Dromios both so exactly alike, he at once conjectured aright of these
seeming mysteries, for he remembered the story AEgeon had told him in
the morning; and he said, these men must be the two sons of AEgeon and
their twin slaves.

But now an unlooked-for joy indeed completed the history of AEgeon;
and the tale he had in the morning told in sorrow, and under sentence
of death, before the setting sun went down was brought to a happy
conclusion, for the venerable lady abbess made herself known to be the
long-lost wife of AEgeon, and the fond mother of the two Antipholises.

When the fishermen took the eldest Antipholis and Dromio away from
her, she entered a nunnery, and by her wise and virtuous conduct she
was at length made lady abbess of this convent, and in discharging
the rites of hospitality to an unhappy stranger she had unknowingly
protected her own son.

Joyful congratulations and affectionate greetings between these long
separated parents and their children, made them for a while forget
that AEgeon was yet under sentence of death; but when they were become
a little calm, Antipholis o