“Oh!”

“You appear surprised.  One might even think that you were sorry.  But may I now ask what you did when you arrived at Draper’s Buildings?”

“Did!  I looked for you!”

“Indeed!  And when you had looked in vain, what was the next item in your programme?”

The lady shrank still farther from him.

“Hereward, have you been having a jest at my expense?  Can you have been so cruel?” Tears stood in her eyes.

Rising, the duke laid his hand upon her arm.

“Mabel, tell me—­what did you do when you had looked for me in vain?”

“I looked for you upstairs and downstairs and everywhere.  It was quite a large place, it took me ever such a time.  I thought that I should go distracted.  Nobody seemed to know anything about you, or even that there had been an accident at all—­it was all offices.  I couldn’t make it out in the least, and the people didn’t seem to be able to make me out either.  So when I couldn’t find you anywhere I came straight home again.”

The duke was silent for a moment.  Then with funereal gravity he turned to Mr. Dacre.  He put to him this question: 

“Ivor, what are you laughing at?”

Mr. Dacre drew his hand across his mouth with rather a suspicious gesture.

“My dear fellow, only a smile!”

The duchess looked from one to the other.

“What have you two been doing?  What is the joke?”

With an air of preternatural solemnity the duke took two letters from the breast pocket of his coat.

“Mabel, you have already seen your letter.  You have already seen the lock of your hair.  Just look at this—­and that.”

He gave her the two very singular communications which had arrived in such a mysterious manner, and so quickly one after the other.  She read them with wide-open eyes.

“Hereward!  Wherever did these come from?”

The duke was standing with his legs apart, and his hands in his trousers pockets.  “I would give—­I would give another five hundred pounds to know.  Shall I tell you, madam, what I have been doing?  I have been presenting five hundred golden sovereigns to a perfect stranger, with a top hat, and a gardenia in his buttonhole.”

“Whatever for?”

“If you have perused those documents which you have in your hand, you will have some faint idea.  Ivor, when it’s your funeral, I’ll smile.  Mabel, Duchess of Datchet, it is beginning to dawn upon the vacuum which represents my brain that I’ve been the victim of one of the prettiest things in practical jokes that ever yet was planned.  When that fellow brought you that card at Cane and Wilson’s—­which, I need scarcely tell you, never came from me—­some one walked out of the front entrance who was so exactly like you that both Barnes and Moysey took her for you.  Moysey showed her into the carriage, and Barnes drove her home.  But when the carriage reached home it was empty.  Your double had got out upon the road.”