In the course of time the twins arrived and were delivered to their great kinsman.To try to describe the rage of that old man would profit nothing, the attempt would fall so far short of the purpose.However when he had worn himself out and got quiet again, he looked the matter over and decided that the twins had some moral rights, although they had no legal ones; they were of his blood, and it could not be decorous to treat them as common clay.So he laid them with their majestic kin in the Cholmondeley church, with imposing state and ceremony, and added the supreme touch by officiating as chief mourner himself.But he drew the line at hatchments.
Our friends in Washington watched the weary days go by, while they waited for Pete and covered his name with reproaches because of his calamitous procrastinations.Meantime, Sally Sellers, who was as practical and democratic as the Lady Gwendolen Sellers was romantic and aristocratic, was leading a life of intense interest and activity and getting the most she could out of her double personality.All day long in the privacy of her work-room, Sally Sellers earned bread for the Sellers family; and all the evening Lady Gwendolen Sellers supported the Rossmore dignity.All day she was American, practically, and proud of the work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions.
By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers.At college she had learned a trade without knowing it.The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns.She had no idle moments after that, and wanted none; for the exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life, and it was manifest that Sally Sellers possessed a gift of that sort in the matter of costume-designing.Within three days after reaching home she had hunted up some work; before Pete was yet due in Washington, and before the twins were fairly asleep in English soil, she was already nearly swamped with work, and the sacrificing of the family chromos for debt had got an effective check.
"She's a brick," said Rossmore to the Major; "just her father all over:
prompt to labor with head or hands, and not ashamed of it; capable, always capable, let the enterprise be what it may; successful by nature--don't know what defeat is; thus, intensely and practically American by inhaled nationalism, and at the same time intensely and aristocratically European by inherited nobility of blood.Just me, exactly: Mulberry Sellers in matter of finance and invention; after office hours, what do you find? The same clothes, yes, but what's in them? Rossmore of the peerage."The two friends had haunted the general post-office daily.At last they had their reward.Toward evening the 20th of May, they got a letter for XYZ.It bore the Washington postmark; the note itself was not dated.It said:
"Ash barrel back of lamp post Black horse Alley.If you are playing square go and set on it to-morrow morning 21st 10.22 not sooner not later wait till I come."The friends cogitated over the note profoundly.Presently the earl said:
"Don't you reckon he's afraid we are a sheriff with a requisition?""Why, m'lord?"