_resumes_ of this subject with his hostess. "Because they were the soyme
oyge," said he. "Loyke me and Dolly. We aren't the soyme oyge, me and
Dolly." That is to say, he and Dolly were an example of persons whose
relative ages came into court. Their classification differed, but that
was a detail.

Aunt M'riar was alive to the possibility that the sister of Granny
Marrable was her twin, and said so. But Uncle Mo took her up short for
this opinion. "What!" said he, "the same as the old party two pair up?
No, no!--you won't convince me there's two old parties at once with twin
sisters. One at a time's plenty on the way-bill." Because, you see, Aunt
M'riar had had a good many conversations with Mrs. Prichard lately, and
had repeated words of hers to Uncle Moses. "I was a twin myself," she
had said; and added that she had lost her sister near upon fifty years
ago.

The truth was too strange to occur to even the most observant bystander;
_videlicet_, on the whole, Mr. Alibone; who, coming in and talking over
the matter anew, only said it struck him as a queer start. This
expression has somehow a sort of flavour of its user's intention to
conduct inquiry no farther. Anyhow, the subject simply dropped for that
time being, out of sight and out of mind.

It was very unfair to Dave, who was, after all, a model of veracity,
that he should be treated as a romancer, and never confronted with
witnesses to confirm or contradict his statements. Even Uncle Mo, who
took him most seriously, continued to doubt the existence of widows'
grandmothers, and to accept with too many reservations his account of
the mill-model. Sister Nora, as it chanced, did not revisit Sapps Court
for a very long time, for she was called away to Scotland by the sudden
illness of her father, who showed an equivocal affection for her by
refusing to let anyone else nurse him.

So it came about that Dave, rather mortified at having doubt thrown on
narratives he knew to be true, discontinued his attempts to establish
them. And that the two old sisters, so long parted, still lived on
apart; each in the firm belief that the other was dead a lifetime since.
How near each had been to the knowledge that the other lived! Surely if
Dave had described that mill-model to old Mrs. Picture, suspicions would
have been excited. But Dave said little or nothing about it.

It is nowise strange to think that the bitter, simultaneous grief in the
heart of either twin, now nearly f