Back to the Berkshires, from overseas, came the two Creedes. The community prepared to welcome Clive with open arms; and to tolerate Osmun, as of old, for the sake of his brother and for the loved memory of his father. At once Aura was relieved of one of its former perplexities. For no longer were the twins impossible to tell apart.

They still bore the most amazing likeness to each other, of course. But a long siege of trench fever had left Osmun slightly bald on the forehead and had put lines and hollows in his good-looking face and had given his wide shoulders a marked stoop. Also, a fragment of shell in the leg had left him with a slight limp. The fever, too, had weakened his eyes; and had forced him to adopt spectacles with a faintly[25] smoked tinge to their lenses. Altogether, he was plainly discernible, now, from his erect brother, and looked nine years older.

[25]

There was another change, too, in the brethren. Hitherto they had lived together at Canobie. On their return from the war they astonished Aura by separating. Osmun lived on at the big house. But Clive took his belongings to Rackrent Farm; and set up housekeeping there; attended by an old negro and his wife, who had worked for his father. He even transported thither the amateur laboratory wherewith he and Osmun had always delighted to putter; and he set it up in a vacant back room of the farmhouse.

Aura was thrilled at these signs of discord in the hitherto inseparable brethren. Clive had been the only mortal to find good in Osmun and to care for his society. Now, apparently, there had been a break.

But almost at once Aura found there had been no break. The twins were as devoted as ever, despite their decision to live two miles apart. They were back and forth, daily, at each other’s homes; and they wrought, side by side, with all their old zeal, in the laboratory.

Osmun’s cantankerous soul did not seem to[26] have undergone any purifying process from war experience and long illness. Within a month after he came back to Aura he proceeded to celebrate his return by raising the rents of the seven cottages he and Clive owned; and by a twenty per cent cut in the pay of the Canobie laborers.

[26]

Aura is not feudal Europe. Nor had Osmun Creede any of the hereditary popularity or masterliness of a feudal baron. Wherefore the seven tenants prepared to walk out of their rent-raised homes. The Canobie 

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