Part 18

The twins leaned forward, charmed.

The doctor looked over his spectacles at them; there was no mistaking the effect he had produced. "Everybody warned them that unless they stopped squabbling, something dreadful would happen to them. But they never believed it till one day--"

The twins held their breath. Dr. Murchison went to the library and took out a book. He knew the value of a dramatic pause.

"--till one day they waked up in the morning and found that they were--stuck--fast--together--for life! Everything the dark one had she just had to share with her twin. And everywhere she went her lazy blonde sister had to go, too. People made up a terrible name for them. They called them"--he lowered his voice to the apologetic tone one has for not quite proper subjects--"the 'Siamese Twins,' and--if you don't believe me, here's their picture!" With a quick movement he opened the book before them.

The twins' faces went gray; in that second they even looked alike, so tense were both with the same emotion. Instinctively they made a swift motion, a dumb prayer for sympathy, toward each other; then as swiftly shuddered apart as though temporary contact might become lifelong bondage.

But as the months went by and they remained mercifully unattached (though battling still in their double capacity of Madigans and twins), they almost outgrew their credulity; yet still, on occasions, observed the morning ceremony of self-inspection.

In fact, though, nothing held them in peace together except sleep, when nature must have reunited them in dreams; for, no matter in what positions they were relatively when they closed their eyes, morning found their arms about each other, their breath intermingled, their little bodies intercurved like well-packed sardines.

On their birthday morning--the twins were born on Christmas--Fom waked very early, alarmed to find Bep's arm about her. She never remembered in the morning that at night her last hazy thought had been to reach for it, pull down the sleeve of its nightgown, and cuddle close to her twin. She threw it from her now with unusual violence, and, sitting up in bed, slipped off her gown that she might closely examine her right side--the side that had been nearest Bep.

The blonde twin woke while this process was going on, and its dread significance shook the haze of slumber from her eyes. She, too, slipped her gown from her shoulders and, shivering with the cold, passed an apprehensive hand along her left ribs.

"Do you?" she whispered.

"N-no. I don't think so. I--I dreamed that it was there, though. Do you?"

An assenting shudder shook Bep's body.

"Where--oh, where? I don't believe it!" cried Fom. "You're just a 'fraid-cat trying to frighten me."

Bep pointed to her side. There it was unmistakably--a round black-and-blue mark.

A wail escaped Florence. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" she cried, "what in the world shall we do?"

Bep did not answer. She sat stupefied, staring at the evidence of calamity.

"If it's commenced on you, it's bound to commence on me before long. I wonder--how fast it grows?"

Bep shook her head. "It wasn't there when I went to sleep."

"If it grows on you toward me, and on me toward you that quick, why, in a week--we'll be--stuck fast--won't we?"

Bep nodded miserably.

"Some morning," mourned Fom, wriggling unhappily, "we'll wake and it'll be all done. You'll just have to study hard, Bessie Madigan, and be in my class in school; I won't go back into the mixed primary--I just won't! Oh, Bep, why will you put your arm around me at night?"

"I don't. I always go to sleep with my back to you. You know I do. And in the morning, the first thing I know you're flinging my arm off. I believe you pull my arm over you yourself. I believe you want to get stuck together and be Chemise Twins!" Bep scolded tearfully, with her usual ill luck with unfamiliar words.

There was a sorrow-smitten pause.

"I say, Beppy," the termination was a sign of sudden good humor in Fom, "didn't you tumble down yesterday when you and Bombey Forrest were driving the Grayson kids round the block in your relay race?"

The light of hope leaped up in Bessie's eyes. "Could it be that?"

"Of course it could; it is, you silly!"

"I'm not a silly. You were scared yourself," retorted the blonde twin, relieved but pugnacious.

"Pooh! I only pretended, to frighten you," jeered Fom.