The
next-of-kin will be sharp enough in coming down upon the money." Ruby looked at me and laughed and clapped her hands again. "But what
would you say, Mr. Payne," she said with a smile that dried up all her
tears, "what would you say if you heard that the next-of-kin was--who do
you think?--why me, sir, me, Ruby Estcourt?" I could hardly believe my ears. "You, Ruby?" I cried in my astonishment. "You! How do you know? Are you really sure of it?" Ruby put a lawyer's letter into my hand, signed by a famous firm in the
city. "Read that," she said simply. I read it through, and saw in a
moment that what Ruby said was the plain truth of it. "So you want to do your future husband out of the twelve hundred a
year!" I said, smiling and kissing her. "No," Ruby answered, as she pressed my hand gently. "It shall be settled
on you, since I know you were ready to give it up for my sake. And there
shall be no more Aikin-Paynes henceforth and for ever." There was never a prettier or more blushing bride than dear little Ruby
that day six weeks. _THE TWO CARNEGIES._


I. "Harold," said Ernest Carnegie to his twin-brother at breakfast one
morning, "have you got a tooth aching slightly to-day?" "Yes, by Jove, I have!" Harold answered, laying down the _Times_, and
looking across the table with interest to his brother; "which one was
yours?" "The third from the canine on the upper left side," Ernest replied
quickly. "And yours?" "Let me see. This is the canine, isn't it? One, two, three; yes. The
same, of course. It's really a very singular coincidence. How about the
time? Was that as usual?" "I'll tell you in a minute. Mine came on the day of the Guthries' hop. I
was down at Brighton that morning. What date? Let me think; why, the
9th, I'm certain. To-day's what, mother?" "The 23rd," said Harold, glancing for confirmation at the paper. "The
law works itself out once more as regularly as if by machinery. I'm just
a fortnight later than you, Ernest, as always." Ernest drummed upon the table with his finger for a minute. "I'm afraid
you'll have it rather badly to-day, Harold," he said, after a pause. "Mine got unbearable towards midday, and if I hadn't had it looked to
in the afternoon, I couldn't have danced a single dance to save my life
that evening. I advise you to go round to the dentist's immediately, and
try to get it stopped before it goes any further." Harold finished his cup of coffee, and looked out of the window blankly
at the fog outside. "It's an awful thought," he said at last, "this
living, as we two do, by clockwork! Everybody else lives exactly the
same way, but they don't have their attention called to it, as we do. Just to think that from the day you and I were born, Ernest, it was
written in the very fabric of our constitutions that when we were
twenty-three years and five months old, the third molar in our upper
left jaws should begin to fail us! It's really appalling in its
unanswerable physical fatalism, when ones comes to think upon it." "So I said to myself at the Guthries', the morning it began to give me a
twinge," said Ernest, in the self-same tone. "It seemed to me such a
terrible idea that in a fortnight's time, as certain as the sun, the
very same tooth in your head would begin to go, as the one that was
going in mine. It's too appalling, really." "But do you actually mean to say," asked pretty little Nellie Holt, the
visitor, newly come the day before from Cheshire, "that whenever one of
you gets a toothache, the other one gets a toothache in the same tooth a
fortnight later?" "Not a toothache only," Ernest answered--he was studying for his degree
as a physician, and took this department upon himself as by right--"but
every other disease or ailment whatsoever. We're like two clocks wound
up to strike at fixed moments; only, we're not wound up to strike
exactly together. I'm fourteen days in advance of Harold, so to speak,
and whatever happens to me to-day will happen to him, in all
probability, exactly a fortnight later." "How very extraordinary!" said Nellie, looking quickly, from one
handsome clear-cut face to its exact counterpart in the other. "And yet
not so extraordinary, after all,--when one comes to think how very much
alike you both are." "Ah, that's not all," said Ernest, slowly; "it's something that goes a
good deal deeper than that, Miss Holt. Consider that every one of us is
born with a certain fixed and recognizable constitution, which we
inherit from our fathers and mothers. In us, from our birth upward, are
the seeds of certain diseases, the possibilities of certain actions and
achievements. One man is born with hereditary consumption; another man
with hereditary scrofula; a third with hereditary genius or hereditary
drunkenness, each equally innate in the very threads and strands of his
system. And it's all bound to come out, sooner or later, in its own due
and appointed time. Here's a fellow whose father had gout at forty: he's
born with such a constitution that, as the hands on his life-dial reach
forty, out comes the gout in his feet, wherever he may be, as certain as
fate. It's horrible to think of, but it's the truth, and there's no good
in disguising it." Nellie Holt shuddered slightly. "What a dreadful materialistic creed,
Mr. Carnegie," she said, looking at him with a half-frightened air. "It's almost as bad as Mohammedan fatalism." "No, not so bad as that," Ernest Carnegie answered; "not nearly so bad
as that. The Oriental belief holds that powers above you compel your
life against your will: we modern scientific thinkers only hold that
your own inborn constitution determines your whole life for you, will
included. But whether we like it or dislike it, Miss Holt, there are the
facts, and nobody can deny them. If you'd lived with a twin-sister, as
Harold and I have lived together for twenty-three years, you'd see that
the clocks go as they are set, with fixed and predestined regularity. Twins, you know, are almost exactly alike in all things, and in the
absolute coincidence of their constitutions you can see the inexorable
march of disease, and the inexorable unfolding of the predetermined
life-history far better than in any other conceivable case. I'm a
scientific man myself, you see, and I have such an opportunity of
watching it all as no other man ever yet had before me." "My dear," said Mrs. Carnegie, the mother, from the head of the table,
"you've no idea how curiously their two lives have always resembled one
other. When they were babies, they were so much alike that we had to tie
red and blue ribbons round their necks to distinguish them. Ernest was
red and Harold blue--no, Ernest was blue and Harold red: at least, I'm
not quite certain which way it was, but I know we have a note of it in
the family Bible, for Mr. Carnegie made it at the time for fear we
should get confused between them when we were bathing them.