It was Anna-Rosa who suggested their being Christopher and Columbus. She was the elder by twenty minutes. Both had had their seventeenth birthday—and what a birthday: no cake, no candles, no kisses and wreaths and home-made poems; but then, as Anna-Felicitas pointed out, to comfort Anna-Rose who was taking it hard, you can't get blood out of an aunt—only a month before. Both were very German outside and very English inside. Both had fair hair, and the sorts of chins Germans have, and eyes the colour of the sky in August along the shores of the Baltic. Their noses were brief, and had been objected to in Germany, where, if you are a Junker's daughter, you are expected to show it in your nose. Anna-Rose had a tight little body, inclined to the round. Anna-Felicitas, in spite of being a twin, seemed to have made the most of her twenty extra minutes to grow more in; anyhow she was tall and thin, and she drooped; and having perhaps grown quicker made her eyes more dreamy, and her thoughts more slow. And both held their heads up with a great air of calm whenever anybody on the ship looked at them, as who should say serenely, "We're thoroughly happy, and having the time of our lives."

The gulls, circling white against the gloomy sky over the rubbish that floated on the Mersey, made them feel extraordinarily forlorn. Empty boxes, bits of straw, orange-peel, a variety of dismal dirtiness lay about on the sullen water; England was slipping away, England, their mother's country, the country of their dreams ever since they could remember—and the St. Luke with a loud screech had suddenly stopped.

Neither of them could help jumping a little at that and getting an inch closer together beneath the rug. Surely it wasn't a submarine already?

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, changing as it were the unspoken conversation.

Their mother had always been cheerful and full of hope. Now that she was dead, it was clearly Anna-Rose's duty, as the next eldest in the family, to carry on the tradition and discountenance too much drooping in Anna-Felicitas. Anna-Felicitas was staring much too thoughtfully at the deepening gloom of the late afternoon sky and the rubbish brooding on the face of the waters, and she had jumped rather excessively when the St. Luke stopped so suddenly, just as if it were putting on the brake hard, and emitted that agonized whistle.

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, "and we're going to discover America."

Uncle Arthur was the husband of Aunt Alice. He didn't like foreigners, and said so. He never had liked them and had always said so. It wasn't the war at all, it was the foreigners. But as the war went on, and these German nieces of his wife became more and more, as he told her, a blighted nuisance, so did he become more and more pointed, and said he didn't mind French foreigners, nor Russian foreigners; and a few weeks later, that it wasn't Italian foreigners either that he minded; and still later, that nor was it foreigners indigenous to the soil of countries called neutral. These things he said aloud at meals in a general way. To his wife when alone he said much more.

Anna-Rose, who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to soften his heart by offering to read aloud to him in the evenings when he came home weary from his daily avocations, which were golf. Her own suggestion instantly projected a touching picture on her impressionable imagination of youth, grateful for a roof over its head, in return alleviating the tedium of crabbed age by introducing its uncle, who from his remarks was evidently unacquainted with them, to the best productions of the great masters of English literature.

Uncle Arthur, like Onkel Col, was a very good man, and though he said things about foreigners he did stick to these unfortunate alien nieces longer than one would have supposed possible if one had overheard what he said to Aunt Alice in the seclusion of their bed. His ordered existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew, was shaken in its innermost parts, in its very marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans. Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned; but who but he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans? And he couldn't groan, because they were, besides being motherless creatures, his own wife's flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he groan; but he could and did do it in bed. Why on earth that silly mother of theirs couldn't have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian sand-heap where she belonged, instead of coming gallivanting over to England, and then when she had got there not even decently staying alive and seeing to her children herself, he at frequent intervals told Aunt Alice in bed that he would like to know.

After three months of them, Uncle Arthur suggested sending them back to Germany; but their consternation had been so great and their entreaties to be kept where they were so desperate that he said no more about that. Besides, they told him that if they went back there they would be sure to be shot as spies, for over there nobody would believe they were German, just as over here nobody would believe they were English; and besides, this was in those days of the war when England was still regarding Germany as more mistaken than vicious, and was as full as ever of the tradition of great and elaborate indulgence and generosity toward a foe, and Uncle Arthur, whatever he might say, was not going to be behind his country in generosity.

At this period Aunt Alice went to bed with reluctance. It was not a place she had ever gone to very willingly since she married Uncle Arthur, for he was the kind of husband who rebukes in bed; but now she was downright reluctant. It was painful to her to be told that she had brought this disturbance into Uncle Arthur's life by having let him marry her. Inquiring backwards into her recollections it appeared to her that she had had no say at all about being married, but that Uncle Arthur had told her she was going to be, and then that she had been. Which was what had indeed happened; for Aunt Alice was a round little woman even in those days, nicely though not obtrusively padded with agreeable fat at the corners, and her skin, just as now, had the moist delicacy that comes from eating a great many chickens. Also she suggested, just as now, most of the things most men want to come home to,—slippers, and drawn curtains, and a blazing fire, and peace within one's borders, and even, as Anna-Rose pointed out privately to Anna-Felicitas after they had come across them for the first time, she suggested muffins; and so, being in these varied fashions succulent, she was doomed to make some good man happy. But she did find it real hard work.

And so, on a late September afternoon, the St. Luke, sliding away from her moorings, relieved Uncle Arthur of his burden.

It was final this time, for the two alien enemies once out of it would not be let into England again till after the war. The enemies themselves knew it was final; and the same knowledge that made Uncle Arthur feel so pleasant as he walked home across his park from golf to tea that for a moment he was actually of a mind to kiss Aunt Alice when he got in, and perhaps even address her in the language of resuscitated passion, which in Uncle Arthur's mouth was Old Girl,—an idea he abandoned, however, in case it should make her self-satisfied and tiresome—the same knowledge that produced these amiable effects in Uncle Arthur, made his alien nieces cling very close together as they leaned over the side of the St. Luke hungrily watching the people on the wharf.

"We ought to have hired somebody," thought Anna-Rose, eyeing the handkerchiefs with miserable little eyes.

"I believe I've gone and caught a cold," remarked Anna-Felicitas in her gentle, staid voice, for she was having a good deal of bother with her eyes and her nose, and could no longer conceal the fact that she was sniffing.

Anna-Rose discreetly didn't look at her. Then she suddenly whipped out her handkerchief and waved it violently.

Anna-Felicitas forgot her eyes and nose and craned her head forward. "Who are you waving to?" she asked, astonished.

"Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose, waving, "Good-bye! Good-bye!"

"Who? Where? Who are you talking to?" asked Anna-Felicitas. "Has any one come to see us off?"

"Good-bye! Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose.

The figures on the wharf were getting smaller, but not until they had faded into a blur did Anna-Rose leave off waving. Then she turned round and put her arm through Anna-Felicitas's and held on to her very tight for a minute.

"There wasn't anybody," she said. "Of course there wasn't. But do you suppose I was going to have us looking like people who aren't seen off?"

"Standing just behind us—"

"Was there a man?" asked Anna-Felicitas, who never saw men any more than she, in her brief career at the hospital, had seen pails.

"Yes. Looking as if in another moment he'd be sorry for us," said Anna-Rose.

"Sorry for us!" repeated Anna-Felicitas, roused to indignation.

"Yes. Did you ever?"

Anna-Felicitas said, with a great deal of energy while she put her handkerchief finally and sternly away, that she didn't ever; and after a pause Anna-Rose, remembering one of her many new responsibilities and anxieties—she had so many that sometimes for a time she didn't remember some of them—turned her head to Anna-Felicitas, and fixing a worried eye on her said, "You won't go forgetting your Bible, will you, Anna F.?"

"My Bible?" repeated Anna-Felicitas, looking blank.

"Your German Bible. The bit about wenn die bösen Buben locken, so folge sie nicht."

Anna-Felicitas continued to look blank, but Anna-Rose with a troubled brow said again, "You won't go and forget that, will you, Anna F.?"

But Anna-Rose secretly considered that the same nose that on her own face made no sort of a show at all, directly it got on to Anna-Felicitas's somehow was the dearest nose; and that her leanness was lovely,—the same sort of slender grace her mother had had in the days before the heart-breaking emaciation that was its last phase; and that her head was set so charmingly on her neck that when she drooped and forgot her father's constant injunction to sit up,—"For," had said her father at monotonously regular intervals, "a maiden should be as straight as a fir-tree,"—she only seemed to fall into even more attractive lines than when she didn't. And now that Anna-Rose alone had the charge of looking after this abstracted and so charming younger sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey to her while tactfully avoiding putting ideas into the poor child's head which might make her conceited, that it behoved her to conduct herself with discretion.

In their berths that night before they went to sleep, it occurred to them that perhaps what was the matter with the stewardess was that she needed a tip. At first, with their recent experiences fresh in their minds, they thought that she was probably passionately pro-Ally, and had already detected all those Junkers in their past and accordingly couldn't endure them. Then they remembered how Aunt Alice had said, "You will have to give your stewardess a little something."

This had greatly perturbed them at the time, for up to then they had been in the easy position of the tipped rather than the tippers, and anyhow they had no idea what one gave stewardesses. Neither, it appeared, had Aunt Alice; for, on being questioned, she said vaguely that as it was an American boat they were going on she supposed it would have to be American money, which was dollars, and she didn't know much about dollars except that you divided them by four and multiplied them by five, or else it was the other way about; and when, feeling still uninformed, they had begged her to tell them why one did that, she said it was the quickest way of finding out what a dollar really was, and would they mind not talking any more for a little while because her head ached.

The lady in the opposite berth was German, and so was the lady in the berth above her. Their husbands were American, but that didn't make them less German. Nothing ever makes a German less German, Anna-Rose explained to Anna-Felicitas.

"Except," replied Anna-Felicitas, "a judicious dilution of their blood by the right kind of mother."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose. "Only to be found in England."

This conversation didn't take place till the afternoon of the next day, by which time Anna-Felicitas already knew about the human freight being Germans, for one of their own submarines came after the St. Luke and no one was quite so loud in expression of terror and dislike as the two Germans.

They demanded to be saved first, on the ground that they were Germans. They repudiated their husbands, and said marriage was nothing compared to how one had been born. The curtains of their berths, till then so carefully closed, suddenly yawned open, and the berths gave up their contents just as if, Anna-Felicitas remarked afterwards to Anna-Rose, it was the resurrection and the berths were riven sepulchres chucking up their dead.

At eight o'clock the stewardess looked in—the same stewardess, they languidly noted, with whom already they had had two encounters, for it happened that this was one of the cabins she attended to—and said that if anybody wanted breakfast they had better be quick or it would be over.

"Breakfast!" cried the top berth opposite in a heart-rending tone; and instantly was sick.

The stewardess withdrew her head and banged the door to, and the twins, in their uneasy berths, carefully keeping their eyes shut so as not to witness the behaviour of the sides and ceiling of the cabin, feebly marvelled at the stewardess for suggesting being quick to persons who were being constantly stood on their heads. And breakfast,—they shuddered and thought of other things; of fresh, sweet air, and of the scent of pinks and apricots warm with the sun.

At ten o'clock the stewardess came in again, this time right in, and with determination in every gesture.

Anna-Felicitas, the one particularly addressed, because she was more on the right level for conversation than Anna-Rose, who could only see the stewardess's apron, turned her head away and murmured that she didn't care.

"Come, come," said the stewardess. "Besides, there's life-boat drill at mid-day, and you've got to be present."

Anna-Felicitas, her eyes shut, again murmured that she didn't care.

"Come, come," said the stewardess. "Orders are orders. Every soul on the ship, sick or not, has got to be present at life-boat drill."

"Oh, I'm not a soul," murmured Anna-Felicitas, who felt at that moment how particularly she was a body, while the opposite berths redoubled their groans.

"Come, come—" said the stewardess.

Nothing more was seen of the submarine.

The German ladies were certain the captain had somehow let them know he had them on board, and were as full of the credit of having saved the ship as if it had been Sodom and Gomorrah instead of a ship, and they the one just man whose presence would have saved those cities if he had been in them; and the American passengers were equally sure that the submarine, on thinking it over, had decided that President Wilson was not a man to be trifled with, and had gone in search of some prey which would not have the might and majesty of America at its back.

She made this observation about four o'clock in the afternoon to Anna-Felicitas in an interval of absence on the part of Mr. Twist—such, the amiable stranger had told them, was his name—who had gone to see about tea being brought up to them; and Anna-Felicitas, able by now to sit up and take notice, the hours of fresh air having done their work, smiled the ready, watery, foolishly happy smile of the convalescent. It was so nice not to feel ill; it was so nice not to have to be saved. If she had been able to talk much, she would have philosophized too, about the number and size of one's negative blessings—all the things one hasn't got, all the very horrid things; why, there's no end to them once you begin to count up, she thought, waterily happy, and yet people grumble.

Anna-Felicitas was in that cleaned-out, beatific, convalescent mood in which one is sure one will never grumble again. She smiled at anybody who happened to pass by and catch her eye. She would have smiled just like that, with just that friendly, boneless familiarity at the devil if he had appeared, or even at Uncle Arthur himself.

No use, agreed Anna-Felicitas, smiling fatuously.

In the middle of them was Uncle Arthur. You always got to him in the end.

Anna-Felicitas nodded and shook her head and was all feeble agreement.

She and Anna-Felicitas had been more hopelessly miserable, Anna-Rose remarked, wandering about the loveliness that belonged to him than they could ever have dreamed was possible. She reminded Anna-Felicitas how they used to rub their eyes to try and see more clearly, for surely these means of happiness, these elaborate arrangements for it all round them, couldn't be for nothing? There must be some of it somewhere, if only they could discover where? And there was none. Not a trace of it. Not even the faintest little swish of its skirts.

There was that about Mr. Twist which, once one had begun them, encouraged confidences; something kind about his eyes, something not too determined about his chin. He bore no resemblance to those pictures of efficient Americans in advertisements with which Europe is familiar,—eagle-faced gentlemen with intimidatingly firm mouths and chins, wiry creatures, physically and mentally perfect, offering in capital letters to make you Just Like Them. Mr. Twist was the reverse of eagle-faced. He was also the reverse of good-looking; that is, he would have been very handsome indeed, as Anna-Rose remarked several days later to Anna-Felicitas, when the friendship had become a settled thing,—which indeed it did as soon as Mr. Twist had finished wiping their eyes and noses that first afternoon, it being impossible, they discovered, to have one's eyes and noses wiped by somebody without being friends afterwards (for such an activity, said Anna-Felicitas, belonged to the same order of events as rescue from fire, lions, or drowning, after which in books you married him; but this having only been wiping, said Anna-Rose, the case was adequately met by friendship)—he would have been very handsome indeed if he hadn't had a face.

"But you have to have a face," said Anna-Felicitas, who didn't think it much mattered what sort it was so long as you could eat with it and see out of it.

"I expect God got tired of him over that last bit," she mused, "and just put on any sort of head."

"Yes—that happened to be lying about," agreed Anna-Felicitas. "In a hurry to get done with him."

"Anyway he's very kind," said Anna-Rose, a slight touch of defiance in her voice.

"Oh, very kind," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And it doesn't matter about faces for being kind," said Anna-Rose.

"Not in the least," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And if it hadn't been for the submarine we shouldn't have got to know him. So you see," said Anna-Rose,—and again produced her favourite remark about good coming out of evil.

The book he read out of and carried about with him his pocket was called "Masterpieces You Must Master," and was an American collection of English poetry, professing in its preface to be a Short Cut to Culture; and he would read with what at that time, it being new to them, seemed to the twins a strange exotic pronunciation, Wordsworth's "Ode to Dooty," and the effect was as if someone should dig a majestic Gregorian psalm in its ribs, and make it leap and giggle.

Anna-Rose, who had no reason to shut her eyes, for she didn't mind what the ship's rail did with the horizon, opened them very round when first Mr. Twist started on his Masterpieces. She was used to hearing them read by her mother in the adorable husky voice that sent such thrills through one, but she listened with the courtesy and final gratitude due to the efforts to entertain her of so amiable a friend, and only the roundness of her eyes showed her astonishment at this waltzing round, as it appeared to her, of Mr. Twist with the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God. He also read "Lycidas" to her, that same "Lycidas" Uncle Arthur took for a Derby winner, and only Anna-Rose's politeness enabled her to refrain from stopping up her ears. As it was, she fidgeted to the point of having to explain, on Mr. Twist's pausing to gaze at her questioningly through the smoke-coloured spectacles he wore on deck, which made him look so like a gigantic dragon-fly, that it was because her deck-chair was so very much harder than she was.

Then Mr. Twist would turn his spectacles towards her in mild inquiry, and Anna-Rose, as always, would rush in and elaborately explain what Anna-Felicitas meant, which was so remote from anything resembling what she had said that Mr. Twist looked more mildly inquiring than ever.

Mr. Twist, who was never able to be anything but kind—he had the most amiable mouth and chin in the world, and his name was Edward—took a lively interest in the plans and probable future of the two Annas. He also took a lively and solicitous interest in their present, and a profoundly sympathetic one in their past. In fact, their three tenses interested him to the exclusion of almost everything else, and his chief desire was to see them safely through any shoals there might be waiting them in the shape of Uncle Arthur's friends—he distrusted Uncle Arthur, and therefore his friends—into the safe and pleasant waters of real American hospitality and kindliness.

He knew that such waters abounded for those who could find the tap. He reminded himself of that which he had been taught since childhood, of the mighty heart of America which, once touched, would take persons like the twins right in and never let them out again. But it had to be touched. It had, as it were, to be put in connection with them by means of advertisement. America, he reflected, was a little deaf. She had to be shouted to. But once she heard, once she thoroughly grasped ...

Uncle Arthur, it appeared, hadn't many friends in America, and those he had didn't like him. At least that was what Mr. Twist gathered from the conversation of Anna-Rose. She didn't positively assert but she very candidly conjectured, and Mr. Twist could quite believe that Uncle Arthur's friends wouldn't be warm ones. Their hospitality he could imagine fleeting and perfunctory. They would pass on the Twinklers as soon as possible, as indeed why should they not? And presently some dreary small job would be found for them, some job as pupil-teacher or girls' companion in the sterile atmosphere of a young ladies' school.

As much as a man of habitually generous impulses could dislike, Mr. Twist disliked Uncle Arthur. Patriotism was nothing at any time to Mr. Twist compared to humanity, and Uncle Arthur's particular kind of patriotism was very odious to him. To wreak it on these two poor aliens! Mr. Twist had no words for it. They had been cut adrift at a tender age, an age Mr. Twist, as a disciplined American son and brother, was unable to regard unmoved, and packed off over the sea indifferent to what might happen to them so long as Uncle Arthur knew nothing about it. Having flung these kittens into the water to swim or drown, so long as he didn't have to listen to their cries while they were doing it, Uncle Arthur apparently cared nothing.

In his mind's eye Mr. Twist saw Uncle Arthur as a typical bullying, red-necked Briton, with short side-whiskers. He pictured him under-sized and heavy-footed, trudging home from golf through the soppy green fields of England to his trembling household. He was quite disconcerted one day to discover from something Anna-Rose said that he was a tall man, and not fat at all, except in one place.

"Indeed," said Mr. Twist, hastily rearranging his mind's-eye view of Uncle Arthur.

"He goes fat suddenly," said Anna-Felicitas, waking from one of her dozes. "As though he had swallowed a bomb, and it had stuck when it got to his waistcoat."

"If you can imagine it," added Anna-Rose politely, ready to explain and describe further if required.

But Mr. Twist could imagine it. He readjusted his picture of Uncle Arthur, and this time got him right,—the tall, not bad-looking man, clean-shaven and with more hair a great deal than he, Mr. Twist, had. He had thought of him as an old ruffian; he now perceived that he could be hardly more than middle-aged and that Aunt Alice, a lady for whom he felt an almost painful sympathy, had a lot more of Uncle Arthur to get through before she was done.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, accepting the word middle-aged as correct. "Neither of his ends looks much older than yours do. He's aged in the middle. That's the only place. Where the bomb is."

When the St. Luke was so near its journey's end that people were packing up, and the word Nantucket was frequent in the scraps of talk the twins heard, they woke up from the unworried condition of mind Mr. Twist's kindness and the dreamy monotony of the days had produced in them, and began to consider their prospects with more attention. This attention soon resulted in anxiety. Anna-Rose showed hers by being irritable. Anna-Felicitas didn't show hers at all.

It was all very well, so long as they were far away from America and never quite sure that a submarine mightn't settle their future for them once and for all, to feel big, vague, heroic things about a new life and a new world and they two Twinklers going to conquer it; but when the new world was really upon them, and the new life, with all the multitudinous details that would have to be tackled, going to begin in a few hours, their hearts became uneasy and sank within them. England hadn't liked them. Suppose America didn't like them either? Uncle Arthur hadn't liked them. Suppose Uncle Arthur's friends didn't like them either? Their hearts sank to, and remained in, their boots.

Uncle Arthur, grievously grumbling, and having previously used in bed most of those vulgar words that made Aunt Alice so miserable, had given Anna-Rose one of the £5 notes for the extra expenses of the journey till, in New York, she should be able to draw on the £200, though what expenses there could be for a couple of girls whose passage was paid Uncle Arthur was damned, he alleged, if he knew; and Aunt Alice had secretly added the other. This was all Anna-Rose's ready money, and it would have to be changed into dollars before reaching New York so as to be ready for emergencies on arrival. She judged from the growing restlessness of the passengers that it would soon be time to go and change it. How many dollars ought she to get?

Mr. Twist was absent, packing his things. She ought to have asked him long ago, but they seemed so suddenly to have reached the end of their journey. Only yesterday there was the same old limitless sea everywhere, the same old feeling that they were never going to arrive. Now the waves had all gone, and one could actually see land. The New World. The place all their happiness or unhappiness would depend on.

She laid hold of Anna-Felicitas, who was walking about just as if she had never been prostrate on a deck-chair in her life, and was going to say something appropriate and encouraging on the Christopher and Columbus lines; but Anna-Felicitas, who had been pondering the £5 notes problem, wouldn't listen.

"No," said Anna-Rose, brought back to her immediate business.

"It's four times more than one, and five times less than the other," said Anna-Felicitas. "That's how you've got to count. That's what Aunt Alice said."

"Yes. And then there's the exchange," said Anna-Rose, frowning. "As if it wasn't complicated enough already, there's the exchange. Uncle Arthur said we weren't to forget that."

Anna-Felicitas wanted to know what was meant by the exchange, and Anna-Rose, unwilling to admit ignorance to Anna-Felicitas, who had to be kept in her proper place, especially when one was just getting to America and she might easily become above herself, said that it was something that varied. ("The exchange, you know, varies," Uncle Arthur had said when he gave her the £5 note. "You must keep your eye on the variations." Anna-Rose was all eagerness to keep her eye on them, if only she had known what and where they were. But one never asked questions of Uncle Arthur. His answers, if one did, were confined to expressions of anger and amazement that one didn't, at one's age, already know.)

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas, for a moment glancing at Anna-Rose out of the corner of her eye, considerately not pressing her further.

"I wish Mr. Twist would come," said Anna-Rose uneasily, looking in the direction he usually appeared from.

"We won't always have him" remarked Anna-Felicitas.

"I never said we would," said Anna-Rose shortly.

"Perhaps we ought to be getting ready too," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Yes. I wish Mr. Twist would come—"

"Perhaps we'd better begin and practise not having Mr. Twist," said Anna-Felicitas, as one who addresses nobody specially and means nothing in particular.

"If anybody's got to practise that, it'll be you," said Anna-Rose. "There'll be no one to roll you up in rugs now, remember. I won't."

"But I don't want to be rolled up in rugs," said Anna-Felicitas mildly. "I shall be walking about New York."

"Oh, you'll see," said Anna-Rose irritably.

She was worried about the dollars. She was worried about the tipping, and the luggage, and the arrival, and Uncle Arthur's friends, whose names were Mr. and Mrs. Clouston K. Sack; so naturally she was irritable. One is. And nobody knew and understood this better than Anna-Felicitas.

"Let's go and put on our hats and get ready," she said, after a moment's pause during which she wondered whether, in the interests of Anna-Rose's restoration to calm, she mightn't have to be sick again. She did hope she wouldn't have to. She had supposed she had done with that. It is true there were now no waves, but she knew she had only to go near the engines and smell the oil. "Let's go and put on our hats," she suggested, slipping her hand through Anna-Rose's arm.

"You'll excuse me saying so," said one of them to Anna-Felicitas as she passed him, "but you're looking very well to-day."

"I expect that's because I am well," said Anna-Felicitas amiably.

Mr. Twist, when he saw them, threw up his hands and ejaculated "My!"

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas, who was herself puzzled by the difference the clothes had made in Anna-Rose after ten solid days of cap and jersey, "I think it's our hats. They do somehow seem very splendid."

"Splendid?" echoed Mr. Twist. "Why, they'd make the very angels jealous, and get pulling off their haloes and kicking them over the edge of heaven."

"What is so wonderful is that Aunt Alice should ever have squeezed them out of Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Rose, gazing lost in admiration at Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't disgorge nice hats easily at all."

And one of the German ladies muttered to the other, as her eye fell on Anna-Felicitas, "Ja, ja, die hat Rasse."

Lost in the contemplation of a distant past Anna-Felicitas sat with her eyes shut long after she needn't have.

She had forgotten about the German ladies, and America, and the future so instantly pressing on her, and was away on the shores of the Baltic again, where bits of amber where washed up after a storm, and the pale rushes grew in shallow sunny water that was hardly salt, and the air seemed for ever sweet with lilac. All the cottage gardens in the little village that clustered round a clearing in the trees had lilac bushes in them, for there was something in the soil that made lilacs be more wonderful there than anywhere else in the world, and in May the whole forest as far as one could walk was soaked with the smell of it. After rain on a May evening, what a wonder it was; what a wonder, that running down the black, oozing forest paths between wet pine stems, out on to the shore to look at the sun setting below the great sullen clouds of the afternoon over on one's left where Denmark was, and that lifting of one's face to the exquisite mingling of the delicate sea smell and the lilac. And then there was home to come back to when the forest began to look too dark and its deep silence made one's flesh creep—home, and a light in the window where ones mother was. Incredible the security of those days, the safe warmth of them, the careless roominess....

Anna-Felicitas opened her eyes, and got up all confused and self-reproachful. Everybody had melted away from that part of the deck except herself and Anna-Rose. The ship was lying quiet at last alongside the wharf. She had over-done being ill this time. She was ashamed of herself for having wandered off so easily and comfortably into the past, and left poor Christopher alone in the difficult present.

"I'm so sorry," she said smiling apologetically, and giving her hat a tug of determination symbolic of her being ready for anything, especially America. "I think I must have gone to sleep. Have you—" she hesitated and dropped her voice. "Are they—are the Clouston Sacks visible yet?"

"I thought I saw them," said Anna-Rose, dropping her voice too, and looking round uneasily over her shoulder. "I'd have come here sooner to see how you were getting on, but I thought I saw them, and they looked so like what I think they will look like that I went into our cabin again for a few minutes. But it wasn't them. They've found the people they were after, and have gone."

"There's a great crowd waiting," said Mr. Twist, coming up, "and I think we ought to go and look for your friends. As you don't know what they're like and they don't know what you're like it may be difficult. Heaven forbid," he continued, "that I should hurry you, but I have to catch a train if I'm to get home to-night, and I don't intend to catch it until I've handed you over safely to the Sacks."

"Come along," said Mr. Twist, urging them to wards the gangway. "Anything you've got to say about life I shall be glad to hear, but at some time when we're more at leisure."

The hotel they were finally sent to by the official, goaded at last by Mr. Twist's want of a made-up mind into independent instructions to the cabman, was the Ritz. He thought this very suitable for the evolver of Twist's Non-Trickler, and it was only when they were being rushed along at what the twins, used to the behaviour of London taxis and not altogether unacquainted with the prudent and police-supervised deliberation of the taxis of Berlin, regarded as a skid-collision-and-mutilation-provoking speed, that a protest from Anna-Rose conveyed to Mr. Twist where they were heading for.

"An hotel called Ritz sounds very expensive," she said. "I've heard Uncle Arthur talk of one there is in London and one there is in Paris, and he said that only damned American millionaires could afford to stay in them. Anna-Felicitas and me aren't American millionaires—"

"Or damned," put in Anna-Felicitas.

"—but quite the contrary," said Anna-Rose, "hadn't you better take us somewhere else?"

"Somewhere like where the Brontes stayed in London," said Anna-Felicitas harping on this idea. "Where cheapness is combined with historical associations."

"Oh Lord, it don't matter," said Mr. Twist, who for the first time in their friendship seemed ruffled.

"Indeed it does," said Anna-Rose anxiously.

"You mustn't run away with the idea that because we've got £200 we're the same as millionaires," said Anna-Rose.

"Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, "frequently told us that £200 is a very vast sum; but he equally frequently told us that it isn't."

"It was when he was talking about having given to us that he said it was such a lot," said Anna-Rose.

"He said that as long as we had it we would be rich," said Anna-Felicitas, "but directly we hadn't it we would be poor."

"So we'd rather not go to the Ritz, please," said Anna-Rose, "if you don't mind."

The taxi was stopped, and Mr. Twist got out and consulted the driver. The thought of his Uncle Charles as a temporary refuge for the twins floated across his brain, but was rejected because Uncle Charles would speak to no woman under fifty except from his pulpit, and approached those he did speak to with caution till they were sixty. He regarded them as one of the chief causes of modern unrest. He liked them so much that he hated them. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance. Uncle Charles was no good as a refuge.

"Well now, see here," said the driver at last, after Mr. Twist had rejected such varied suggestions of something small and quiet as the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Biltmore, "you tell me where you want to go to and I'll take you there."

"I want to go to the place your mother would stay in if she came up for a day or two from the country," said Mr. Twist helplessly.

But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity he was unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy pleasantries with him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in a street off the less desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of him.

It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are both noisy and expensive. It was full of foreigners,—real foreigners, the twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like themselves, but people with yellow faces and black eyes. They looked very seedy and shabby, and smoked very much, and talked volubly in unknown tongues. The entrance hall, a place of mottled marble, with clerks behind a counter all of whose faces looked as if they were masks, was thick with them; and it was when they turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas passed and Anna-Rose was thinking proudly, "Yes, you don't see anything like that every day, do you," and herself looked fondly at her Columbus, that she saw that it wasn't Columbus's beauty at all but the sulphur on the back of her skirt.

This spoilt Anna-Rose's arrival in New York. All the way up in the lift to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was trying to brush it off, for the dress was Anna-F.'s very best one.

"That's all your grips, ain't it?" said the youth in buttons who had come up with them, dumping their bags down on the bedroom floor.

"Then," said Mr. Twist, "if this is all you're going to see of New York, this one evening, let us go and look at it."

He beckoned to the waiter who came up with the bill. Anna-Rose pulled out her purse. Mr. Twist put up his hand with severe determination.

"You're my guest," he said, "as long as I am with you. Useless to protest, young lady. You'll not get me to belie my American manhood. I only listened with half an ear to all the things you both said in the taxi, because I hadn't recovered from the surprise of finding myself still with you instead of on the train for Clark, and because you both of you do say so very many things. But understand once and for all that in this country everything female has to be paid for by some man. I'm that man till I've left you on the Sack doorstep, and then it'll be Sack—confound him," finished Mr. Twist suddenly.

And he silenced Anna-Rose's protests, which persisted and were indignant, by turning on her with, an irascibility she hadn't yet seen in him, and inquiring of her whether then she really wished to put him to public shame? "You wouldn't wish to go against an established custom, surely," he said more gently.

"Can you type?" asked Mr. Twist.

They had left early that morning for Boston, determined, as they wrote, no longer to trespass on his kindness. There had been a discussion in their bedroom the night before when they got back in which Anna-Rose supplied the heat and Anna-Felicitas the arguments, and it ended in Anna-Felicitas succeeding in restoring Anna-Rose to her original standpoint of proud independence, from which, lured by the comfort and security of Mr. Twist's companionship, she had been inclined to slip.

But Anna-Felicitas prevailed. She had all Anna-Rose's inborn horror of accepting money or other benefits from people who had no natural right to exercise their benevolences upon her, to appeal to. Christopher, after long wrestling restored at last to pride, did sit down and write the letter that so much spoilt Mr. Twist's breakfast next morning, while Columbus slouched about the room suggesting sentences.

Mr. Twist hurried out to the office.

The clerk who had been so confidential in his manner the evening before looked at him curiously. Yes, the young ladies had left on the 8.15 for Boston. They had come downstairs, baggage and all, at seven o'clock, had asked for a taxi, had said they wished to go to Boston, inquired about the station, etc., and had specially requested that Mr. Twist should not be disturbed.

"They seemed in a slight hurry to be off," said the clerk, "and didn't like there being no train before the 8.15. I thought you knew all about it, Mr. Twist," he added inquisitively.

"So I did—so I did," said Mr. Twist, turning away to go back to his breakfast for three.

"So he did—so he did," muttered the clerk with a wink to the other clerk; and for a few minutes they whispered, judging from the expressions on their faces, what appeared to be very exciting things to each other.

The taxi had stopped in front of a handsome apartment house, and almost before it was quiet a boy in buttons darted out across the intervening wide pavement and thrust his face through the window.

"Who do you want?" he said, or rather jerked out.

He then saw the contents of the taxi, and his mouth fell open; for it seemed to him that grips and passengers were piled up inside it in a seething mass.

"We want Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack," said Anna-Rose in her most grown-up voice. "They're expecting us."

"They ain't," said the boy promptly.

"They ain't?" repeated Anna-Rose, echoing his language in her surprise.

"How do you know?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"That they ain't? Because they ain't," said the boy. "I bet you my Sunday shirt they ain't."

The twins stared at him. They were not accustomed in their conversations with the lower classes to be talked to about shirts.

The boy seemed extraordinarily vital. His speech was so quick that it flew out with the urgency and haste of squibs going off.

"Please open the door," said Anna-Rose recovering herself. "We'll go up and see for ourselves."

"You won't see," said the boy.

"Kindly open the door," repeated Anna-Rose.

The minute the door opened, grips fell out. There were two umbrellas, two coats, a knapsack of a disreputable bulged appearance repugnant to American ideas of baggage which run on big simple lines of huge trunks, an attaché case, a suit case, a hold-all, a basket and a hat-box. Outside beside the driver were two such small and modest trunks that they might almost as well have been grips themselves.

"Do you mind taking those in?" asked Anna-Rose, getting out with difficulty over the umbrella that had fallen across the doorway, and pointing to the gutter in which the other umbrella and the knapsack lay and into which the basket, now that her body no longer kept it in, was rolling.

"In where?" crackled the boy.

"In," said Anna-Rose severely. "In to wherever Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack are."

"It's no good your saying they are when they ain't," said the boy, increasing the loudness of his crackling.

"Do you mean they don't live here?" asked Anna-Felicitas, in her turn disentangling herself from that which was still inside the taxi, and immediately followed on to the pavement by the hold-all and the attaché case.

"They did live here till yesterday," said the boy, "but now they don't. One does. But that's not the same as two. Which is what I meant when you said they're expecting you and I said they ain't."

"Do you mean to say—" Anna-Rose stopped with a catch of her breath. "Do you mean," she went on in an awe-struck voice, "that one of them—one of them is dead?"

"Oh," said Anna-Rose greatly relieved, passing over his last word, whose meaning escaped her, "oh—you mean just gone to meet us. And missed us. You see," she said, turning to Anna-Felicitas, "they did try to after all."

Anna-Felicitas said nothing, but reflected that whichever Sack had tried to must have a quite unusual gift for missing people.

"Gone to meet you?" repeated the boy, as one surprised by a new point of view. "Well, I don't know about that—"

"We'll go up and explain," said Anna-Rose. "Is it Mr. or Mrs. Clouston Sack who is here?"

"Mr.," said the boy.

"Very well then. Please bring in our things." And Anna-Rose proceeded, followed by Anna-Felicitas, to walk into the house.

The boy, instead of bringing them in, picked up the articles lying on the pavement and put them back again into the taxi. "No hurry about them, I guess," he said to the driver. "Time enough to take them up when the gurls ask again—" and he darted after the gurls to hand them over to his colleague who worked what he called the elevator.

"Why do you call it the elevator," inquired Anna-Felicitas, mildly inquisitive, of this boy, who on hearing that they wished to see Mr. Sack stared at them with profound and unblinking interest all the way up, "when it is really a lift?"

"Because it is an elevator," said the boy briefly.

"But we, you see," said Anna-Felicitas, "are equally convinced that it's a lift."

The lift stopped at what the twins supposed was going to be the door of a landing or public corridor, but it was, they discovered, the actual door of the Sack flat. At any moment the Sacks, if they wished to commit suicide, could do so simply by stepping out of their own front door. They would then fall, infinitely far, on to the roof of the lift lurking at the bottom.

The lift-boy pressed a bell, the door opened, and there, at once exposed to the twins, was the square hall of the Sack flat with a manservant standing in it staring at them.

Obsessed by his idea, the lift-boy immediately stepped out of his lift, approached the servant, introduced his passengers to him by saying, "Young ladies to see Mr. Sack," took a step closer, and whispered in his ear, but perfectly audibly to the twins who, however, regarded it as some expression peculiarly American and were left unmoved by it, "The co-respondents."

And so it came about that just as the reunited Twists, mother, son and daughter, were sitting in the drawing-room, a little tired after a long afternoon of affection, waiting for seven o'clock to strike and, with the striking, Amanda the head maid to appear and announce supper, but waiting with lassitude, for they had not yet recovered from an elaborate welcoming dinner, the Twinklers, in the lovely twilight of a golden day, were hastening up the winding road from the station towards them. Silent, and a little exhausted, the unconscious Twists sat in their drawing-room, a place of marble and antimacassars, while these light figures, their shoes white with the dust of a country-side that had had no rain for weeks, sped every moment nearer.

The road wound gently upwards through fields and woods, through quiet, delicious evening country, and there was one little star twinkling encouragingly at the twins from over where they supposed Clark would be. At the station there had been neither porter nor conveyance, nor indeed anybody or anything at all except themselves, their luggage, and a thin, kind man who represented authority. Clark is two miles away from its station, and all the way to it is uninhabited. Just at the station are a cluster of those hasty buildings America flings down in out-of-the-way places till she shall have leisure to make a splendid city; but the road immediately curved away from these up into solitude and the evening sky.

"Why do you call him young Mr. Twist," inquired Anna-Felicitas, "when he isn't? He must be at least thirty or forty or fifty."

"You see, we know him quite well," said Anna-Rose proudly, as they walked off. "He's a great friend of ours."

"You don't say," said the station-master, who was chewing gum; and as the twins had not yet seen this being done they concluded he had been interrupted in the middle of a meal by the arrival of the train.

"Now mind," he called after them, "you do whatever the road does. Give yourselves up to it, and however much it winds about stick to it. You'll meet other roads, but don't you take any notice of them."

"Let's hurry," said Anna-Felicitas. "I'm so dreadfully hungry. I do so terribly want supper. And I'm sure it's supper-time, and the Twists will have finished and we mightn't get any."

"As though Mr. Twist wouldn't see to that!" exclaimed Anna-Rose, proud and confident.

But she did begin to run, for she too was very hungry, and they raced the rest of the way; which is why they arrived on the Twist doorstep panting, and couldn't at first answer Amanda the head maid's surprised and ungarnished inquiry as to what they wanted, when she opened the door and found them there.

"We want Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose, as soon as she could speak.

Amanda eyed them. "You from the village?" she asked, thinking perhaps they might be a deputation of elder school children sent to recite welcoming poems to Mr. Twist on his safe return from the seat of war. Yet she knew all the school children and everybody else in Clark, and none of them were these.

"No—from the station," panted Anna-Rose.

"We didn't see any village," panted Anna-Felicitas.

"We want Mr. Twist please," said Anna-Rose struggling with her breath.

At the head of the table sat his mother; long, straight, and grave. She was in the seat of authority, the one with its back to the windows and its face to the door, from whence she could see what everybody did, especially Amanda. Having seen what Amanda did, she then complained to Edith. She didn't complain direct to Amanda, because Amanda could and did give notice.

Her eyes were fixed on the door. Between it and her was the table, covered with admirable things to eat, it being supper and therefore, according to a Twist tradition surviving from penurious days, all the food, hot and cold, sweet and salt, being brought in together, and Amanda only attending when rung for. Half-eaten oyster patties lay on Mrs. Twist's plate. In her glass neglected champagne had bubbled itself flat. Her hand still held her fork, but loosely, as an object that had lost its interest, and her eyes and ears for the last five minutes had not departed from the door.

Mrs. Twist often had forebodings, and they were always cold. They seized her with bleak fingers; and one of Edith's chief functions was to comfort and reassure her for as long a while each time as was required to reach the stage of being able to shake them off. Here was one, however, too icily convincing to be shaken off. It fell upon her with the swiftness of a revelation. Something unpleasant was going to happen to her; something perhaps worse than unpleasant,—disastrous. And something immediate.

Those excited voices out in the hall,—they were young, surely, and they were feminine. Also they sounded most intimate with Edward. What had he been concealing from her? What disgracefulness had penetrated through him, through the son the neighbourhood thought so much of, into her very home? She was a widow. He was her only son. Impossible to believe he would betray so sacred a position, that he whom she had so lovingly and proudly welcomed a few hours before would allow his—well, she really didn't know what to call them, but anyhow female friends of whom she had been told nothing, to enter that place which to every decent human being is inviolable, his mother's home. Yet Mrs. Twist did instantly believe it.

Edward had been deceiving her.

"Mother—" he began.

"How do you do," said the girls together, and actually with smiles.

Edward had been deceiving her. That whole afternoon how quiet he had been, how listless. Quite gentle, quite affectionate, but listless and untalkative. She had thought he must be tired; worn out with his long journey across from Europe. She had made allowances for him; been sympathetic, been considerate. And look at him now. Never had she seen him with a face like that. He was—Mrs. Twist groped for the word and reluctantly found it—rollicking. Yes; that was the word that exactly described him—rollicking. If she hadn't observed his languor up to a few minutes ago at supper, and seen him with her own eyes refuse champagne and turn his back on cocktails, she would have been forced to the conclusion, dreadful though it was to a mother, that he had been drinking. And the girls! Two of them. And so young.

This night was the turning-point in Mr. Twist's life. In it he broke loose from his mother. He spent a terrible three hours with her in the drawing-room, and the rest of the night he strode up and down his bedroom. The autumn morning, creeping round the house in long white wisps, found him staring out of his window very pale, his mouth pulled together as tight as it would go.

His mother had failed him. She had not understood. And not only simply not understood, but she had said things when at last she did speak, after he had explained and pleaded for at least an hour, of an incredible bitterness and injustice. She had seemed to hate him. If she hadn't been his mother Mr. Twist would have been certain she hated him, but he still believed that mothers couldn't hate their children. It was stark against nature; and Mr. Twist still believed in the fundamental rightness of that which is called nature. She had accused him of gross things—she, his mother, who from her conversation since he could remember was unaware, he had judged, of the very existence of such things. Those helpless children ... Mr. Twist stamped as he strode. Well, he had made her take that back; and indeed she had afterwards admitted that she said it in her passion of grief and disappointment, and that it was evident these girls were not like that.

The twins, who had gone to bed at half-past nine, shepherded by Edith, in the happy conviction that they had settled down comfortably for some time, were surprised to find at breakfast that they hadn't.

They had taken a great fancy to Edith, in spite of a want of restfulness on her part that struck them while they were finishing their supper, and to which at last they drew her attention. She was so kind, and so like Mr. Twist; but though she looked at them with hospitable eyes and wore an expression of real benevolence, it didn't escape their notice that she seemed to be listening to something that wasn't, anyhow, them, and to be expecting something that didn't, anyhow, happen. She went several times to the door through which her brother and mother had disappeared, and out into whatever part of the house lay beyond it, and when she came back after a minute or two was as wanting in composure as ever.

At last, finding these abrupt and repeated interruptions hindered any real talk, they pointed out to her that reasoned conversation was impossible if one of the parties persisted in not being in the room, and inquired of her whether it were peculiar to her, or typical of the inhabitants of America, to keep on being somewhere else. Edith smiled abstractedly at them, said nothing, and went out again.

Then at last Edith came back, and told them she was sure they were very tired after their long day, and suggested their going upstairs to their rooms. The rooms were ready, said Edith, the baggage had come, and she was sure they would like to have nice hot baths and go to bed.

The twins obeyed her readily, and she checked a desire on their part to seek out her mother and brother first and bid them good-night, on the ground that her mother and brother were busy; and while the twins were expressing polite regret, and requesting her to convey their regret for them to the proper quarter in a flow of well-chosen words that astonished Edith, who didn't know how naturally Junkers make speeches, she hurried them by the drawing-room door through which, shut though it was, came sounds of people being, as Anna-Felicitas remarked, very busy indeed; and Anna-Rose, impressed by the quality and volume of Mr. Twist's voice as it reached her passing ears, told Edith that intimately as she knew her brother she had never known him as busy as that before.

They found they each had a bedroom, with a door between, and that each bedroom had a bathroom of its own, which filled them with admiration and pleasure. There had only been one bathroom at Uncle Arthur's, and at home in Pomerania there hadn't been any at all. The baths there had been vessels brought into one's bedroom every night, into which servants next morning poured water out of buckets, having previously pumped the water into the bucket from the pump in the backyard. They put Edith in possession of these facts while she helped them unpack and brushed and plaited their hair for them, and she was much astonished,—both at the conditions of discomfort and slavery they revealed as prevalent in other countries, and at the fact that they, the Twinklers, should hail from Pomerania.

Pomerania, reflected Edith as she tied up their pigtails with the ribbons handed to her for that purpose, used to be in Germany when she went to school, and no doubt still was. She became more thoughtful than ever, though she still smiled at them, for how could she help it? Everyone, Edith was certain, must needs smile at the Twinklers even if they didn't happen to be one's own dear brother's protegees. And when they came out, very clean and with scrubbed pink ears, from their bath, she not only smiled at them as she tucked them up in bed, but she kissed them good-night.

"You remind me so of Mr. Twist," murmured Anna-Felicitas sleepily, as Edith tucked her up and kissed her.

"You do all the sorts of things he does," murmured Anna-Rose, also sleepily, when it was her turn to be tucked up and kissed; and in spite of a habit now fixed in her of unquestioning acceptance and uncritical faith. Edith went downstairs to her restless vigil outside the drawing-room door a little surprised.

At breakfast the twins learnt to their astonishment that, though appearances all pointed the other way what they were really doing was not being stationary at all, but merely having a night's lodging and breakfast between, as it were, two trains.

Mr. Twist, who looked pale and said shortly when the twins remarked solicitously on it that he felt pale, briefly announced the fact.

"What?" exclaimed Anna-Rose, staring at Mr. Twist and then at Edith—Mrs. Twist, they were told, was breakfasting in bed—"Why, we've unpacked."

"You will re-pack," said Mr. Twist.

They found difficulty in believing their ears.

"But we've settled in," remonstrated Anna-Felicitas, after an astonished pause.

"You will settle out," said Mr. Twist.

After this brief éclaircissement the rest of the journey was happy. Indeed, it is doubtful if any one can journey to California and not be happy.

But the desert has a peculiarly exhilarating air. It came in everywhere, and seemed to tickle him out of the uneasy mood proper to one who has been cutting himself off for good and all from his early home. For the life of him he couldn't help feeling extraordinarily light and free. Edith—yes, there was Edith, but some day he would make up to Edith for everything. There was no helping her now: she was fast bound in misery and iron, and didn't even seem to know it. So would he have been, he supposed, if he had never left home at all. As it was, it was bound to come, this upheaval. Just the mere fact of inevitable growth would have burst the bands sooner or later. There oughtn't, of course, to have been any bands; or, there being bands, he ought long ago to have burst them.

He pulled his kind slack mouth firmly together and looked determined. Long ago, repeated Mr. Twist, shaking his head at his own weak past. Well, it was done at last, and never again—never, never again, he said to himself, sniffing in through his open window the cold air of the desert at sunrise.

The twins and Mr. Twist were in the restaurant-car lunching when the miracle happened. Suddenly the door opened and in came summer, with a great warm breath of roses. In a moment the car was invaded by the scent of flowers and fruit and of something else strange and new and very aromatic. The electric fans were set twirling, the black waiters began to perspire, the passengers called for cold things to eat, and the twins pulled off their knitted caps and jerseys.

For the first time since the war began and with it their wanderings, the twins felt completely happy. It was as though the loveliness wrapped them round and they stretched themselves in it and forgot. No fear of the future, no doubt of it at all, they thought, gazing out of the window, the soft air patting their faces, could possibly bother them here. They never, for instance, could be cold here, or go hungry. A great confidence in life invaded them. The Delloggs, sun-soaked and orange-fed for years in this place, couldn't but be gentle too, and kind and calm. Impossible not to get a sort of refulgence oneself, they thought, living here, and absorb it and give it out again. They pictured the Delloggs as bland pillars of light coming forward effulgently to greet them, and bathing them in the beams of their hospitality. And the feeling of responsibility and anxiety that had never left Anna-Rose since she last saw Aunt Alice dropped off her in this place, and she felt that sun and oranges, backed by £200 in the bank, would be difficult things for misfortune to get at.

Manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into a house where there is going to be a funeral next day, even if one has come all the way from New York and has nowhere else to go. Equally manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into it after the funeral till a decent interval has elapsed. But what the devil, Mr. Twist asked himself in language become regrettably natural to him since his sojourn at the front, is a decent interval?

This Mr. Twist asked himself late that night, pacing up and down the sea-shore in the warm and tranquil darkness in front of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, while the twins, utterly tired out by their journey and the emotions at the end of it, crept silently into bed.

How long does it take a widow to recover her composure? Recover, that is, the first beginnings of it? At what stage in her mourning is it legitimate to intrude on her with reminders of obligations incurred before she was a widow,—with, in fact, the Twinklers? Delicacy itself would shrink from doing it under a week thought Mr. Twist, or even under a fortnight, or even if you came to that, under a month; and meanwhile what was he to do with the Twinklers?

He walked up and down the sands frowning and pulling his mouth together, while the Pacific sighed sympathetically at his feet. Across the road the huge hotel standing in its gardens was pierced by a thousand lights. Very few people were about and no one at all was on the sands. There was an immense noise of what sounded like grasshoppers or crickets, and also at intervals distant choruses of frogs, but these sounds seemed altogether beneficent,—so warm, and southern, and far away from less happy places where in October cold winds perpetually torment the world. Even in the dark Mr. Twist knew he had got to somewhere that was beautiful. He could imagine nothing more agreeable than, having handed over the twins safely to the Delloggs, staying on a week or two in this place and seeing them every day,—perhaps even, as he had pictured to himself on the journey, being invited to stay with the Delloggs. Now all that was knocked on the head. He supposed the man Dellogg couldn't help being dead but he, Mr. Twist, equally couldn't help resenting it. It was so awkward; so exceedingly awkward. And it was so like what one of that creature Uncle Arthur's friends would do.

Mr. Twist didn't sleep very well that night. He lay in his rosy room, under a pink silk quilt, and most of the time stared out through the open French windows with their pink brocade curtains at the great starry night, thinking.

In that soft bed, so rosy and so silken as to have been worthy of the relaxations of, at least, a prima donna, he looked like some lean and alien bird nesting temporarily where he had no business to. He hadn't thought of buying silk pyjamas when the success of his teapot put him in the right position for doing so, because his soul was too simple for him to desire or think of anything less candid to wear in bed than flannel, and he still wore the blue flannel pyjamas of a careful bringing up. In that beautiful bed his pyjamas didn't seem appropriate. Also his head, so frugal of hair, didn't do justice to the lace and linen of a pillow prepared for the hairier head of, again at least, a prima donna. And finding he couldn't sleep, and wishing to see the stars he put on his spectacles, and then looked more out of place than ever. But as nobody was there to see him,—which, Mr. Twist sometimes thought when he caught sight of himself in his pyjamas at bed-time, is one of the comforts of being virtuously unmarried,—nobody minded.

But she didn't come by it at once.

They got into the car first, which was waiting for them in the scented road at the bottom of the field they had walked across, and they got into it in silence and were driven back to their hotel for tea, and her brain was still unvisited by inspiration.

They were all tired and thirsty, and were disappointed at being thwarted in their desire to sit at a little green table under whispering trees and rest, and drink tea, and had no sort of wish to have it at the Cosmopolitan. But both Mr. Twist, who had been corrupted by Europe, and the twins, who had the habits of their mother, couldn't imagine doing without it in the afternoon, and they would have it in the hotel sooner than not have it at all. It was brought to them after a long time of waiting. Nobody else was having any at that hour, and the waiter, when at last one was found, had difficulty apparently in believing that they were serious. When at last he did bring it, it was toast and marmalade and table-napkins, for all the world as though it had been breakfast.

Then it was that, contemplating this with discomfort and distaste, as well as the place they were sitting in and its rocking-chairs and marble and rugs, Anna-Felicitas was suddenly smitten by her idea.

"What's the matter?" asked Anna-Rose. "Has another button come off?"

At this Mr. Twist considered it wisest to turn his head away, for experience had taught him that Anna-Felicitas easily came undone.

"I've thought of something," said Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist turned his head back again. "You don't say," he said, mildly sarcastic.

"Ich gratuliere," said Anna-Rose, also mildly sarcastic.

"I've got an idea," said Anna-Felicitas. "But it's so luminous," she said, looking from one to the other in a kind of surprise. "Of course. That's what we'll do. Ridiculous to waste time bothering about schools."

There was a new expression on her face that silenced the comments rising to Anna-Rose's and Mr. Twist's tongues, both of whom had tired feet and were therefore disposed to sarcasm.

Anna-Felicitas looked at them, and they looked at her, and her face continued to become visibly more and more illuminated, just as if a curtain were being pulled up. Animation and interest shone in her usually dreamy eyes. Her drooping body sat up quite straight. She reminded Anna-Rose, who had a biblically well-furnished mind, of Moses when he came down from receiving the Law on the mountain.

The very next morning they set out house-hunting, and two days later they had found what they wanted. Not exactly what they wanted of course, for the reason, as Anna-Felicitas explained that nothing ever is exactly, but full of possibilities to the eye of imagination, and there were six of this sort of eye gazing at the little house.

It stood at right angles to a road much used by motorists because of its beauty, and hidden from it by trees on the top of a slope of green fields scattered over with live oaks that gently descended down towards the sea. Its back windows, and those parts of it that a house is ashamed of, were close up to a thick grove of eucalyptus which continued to the foot of the mountains. It had an overrun little garden in front, separated from the fields by a riotous hedge of sweetbriar. It had a few orange, and lemon, and peach trees on its west side, the survivors of what had once been intended for an orchard, and a line of pepper trees on the other, between it and the road. Neglected roses and a huge wistaria clambered over its dilapidated face. Somebody had once planted syringas, and snowballs, and lilacs along the inside of the line of pepper trees, and they had grown extravagantly and were an impenetrable screen, even without the sweeping pepper trees from the road.

The other houses the agent pressed on them were superior in every way except situation; but situation being the first consideration, Mr. Twist agreed with the twins, who had fallen in love with the neglected little house whose shabbiness was being so industriously hidden by roses, that this was the place, and a week later it and its garden had been bought—Mr. Twist didn't tell the twins he had bought it, in order to avoid argument, but it was manifestly the simple thing to do—and over and round and through it swarmed workmen all day long, like so many diligent and determined ants. Also, before the week was out, the middle-aged lady had been found and engaged, and a cook of gifts in the matter of cakes. This is the way you do things in America. You decide what it is that you really want, and you start right away and get it. "And everything so cheap too!" exclaimed the twins gleefully, whose £200 was behaving, it appeared, very like the widow's cruse.

The twins had a bad moment of chill fear and misgiving, and then once more were saved by an inspiration,—this time Anna-Rose's.

"I know," she exclaimed, her face clearing. "We'll make it Co-operative."

Mr. Twist, whose brow too had been puckered in the effort to think out a way of persuading the twins to let him help them openly with his money, for in spite of his going to be their guardian they remained difficult on this point, jumped at the idea. He couldn't, of course, tell what in Anna-Rose's mind the word co-operative stood for, but felt confident that whatever it stood for he could manipulate it into covering his difficulties.

"What is co-operative?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with a new respect for a sister who could suddenly produce a business word like that and seem to know all about it. She had heard the word herself, but it sat very loosely in her head, at no point touching anything else.

"Haven't you heard of Co-operative Stores?" inquired Anna-Rose.

"Yes but—"

"Well, then."

"Yes, but what would a co-operative inn be?" persisted Anna-Felicitas.

Various things had happened, however, before this morning of the great day was reached, and Mr. Twist had had some harassing experiences.

One of the first things he had done after the visit to Los Angeles was to take steps in the matter of the guardianship. He had written to Mrs. Bilton that he was the Miss Twinklers' guardian, though it was not at that moment true. It was clear, he thought, that it should be made true as quickly as possible, and he therefore sought out a lawyer in Acapulco the morning after the interview. This was not the same lawyer who did his estate business for him; Mr. Twist thought it best to have a separate one for more personal affairs.

On hearing Mr. Twist's name announced, the lawyer greeted him as an old friend. He knew, of course, all about the teapot, for the Non-Trickler was as frequent in American families as the Bible and much more regularly used; but he also knew about the cottage at the foot of the hills, what it had cost—which was little—and what it would cost—which was enormous—before it was fit to live in. The only thing he didn't know was that it was to be used for anything except an ordinary pied-à-terre. He had heard, too, of the presence at the Cosmopolitan of the twins, and on this point, like the rest of Acapulco, was a little curious.

The lawyer, then, who appreciated the young and pretty as much as other honest men, began the interview with Mr. Twist by warmly congratulating him, when he heard what he had come for, on his taste in wards.

Mr. Twist received this a little coldly, and said it was not a matter of taste but of necessity. The Miss Twinklers were orphans, and he had been asked—he cleared his throat—asked by their relatives, by, in fact, their uncle in England, to take over their guardianship and see that they came to no harm.

The lawyer nodded intelligently, and said that if a man had wards at all they might as well be cute wards.

Yet another harassing experience awaited Mr. Twist before the end of that week.

It had been from the first his anxious concern that nothing should occur at the Cosmopolitan to get his party under a cloud; yet it did get under a cloud, and on the very last afternoon, too, before Mrs. Bilton's arrival. Only twenty-four hours more and her snowy-haired respectability would have spread over the twins like a white whig. They would have been safe. His party would have been unassailable. But no; those Twinklers, in spite of his exhortation whenever he had a minute left to exhort in, couldn't, it seemed, refrain from twinkling,—the word in Mr. Twist's mind covered the whole of their easy friendliness, their flow of language, their affable desire to explain.

He had kept them with him as much as he could, and luckily the excited interest they took in the progress of the inn made them happy to hang about it most of the time of the delicate and dangerous week before Mrs. Bilton came; but they too had things to do,—shopping in Acapulco choosing the sea-blue linen frocks and muslin caps and aprons in which they were to wait at tea, and buying the cushions and flower-pots and canary that came under the general heading, in Anna-Rose's speech, of feminine touches. So they sometimes left him; and he never saw them go without a qualm.

"Of course we won't."

"I meant, nobody is to know what it's really going to be. They're to think it's just a pied-à-terre. It would most ruin my advertisement scheme if they—"

"But of course we won't. Have we ever?" the twins would answer, looking very smug and sure of themselves.

"No. Not yet. But—"

And the hustled man would plunge again into technicalities with whichever expert was at that moment with him, leaving the twins, as he needs must, to God and their own discretion.

Discretion, he already amply knew, was not a Twinkler characteristic. But the week passed, Mrs. Bilton's arrival grew near, and nothing had happened. It was plain to the watchful Mr. Twist, from the pleasant looks of the other guests when the twins went in and out of the restaurant to meals, that nothing had happened. His heart grew lighter. On the last afternoon, when Mrs. Bilton was actually due next day, his heart was quite light, and he saw them leave him to go back and rest at the hotel, because they were tired by the accumulated standing about of the week, altogether unconcernedly.

The social column of the Acapulco daily paper, from which information as to new arrivals was usually got, had, as we know, in its embarrassment at being ignorant to take refuge in French, because French may so easily be supposed to mean something. The paper had little knowledge of, but much confidence in, French. Entourage had seemed to it as good a word as any other, as indeed did clientèle. It had hesitated between the two, but finally chose entourage because there happened to be no accent in its stock of type. The Cosmopolitan guests were amused at the word, and though inquisitive were altogether amiable; and, until the last afternoon, only the manager didn't like the Twinklers. He didn't like them because of the canary. His sympathies had been alienated from the Miss Twinklers the moment he heard through the chambermaid that they had tied the heavy canary cage on to the hanging electric light in their bedroom. He said nothing, of course. One doesn't say anything if one is an hotel manager, until the unique and final moment when one says everything.

The other guests also observed them.

It was the first time the entourage had appeared without its companion, and the other guests were dying to know details about it. It hadn't been sitting in the hall five minutes before a genial old gentleman caught Anna-Felicitas's friendly eye and instantly drew up his chair.

"Uncle gone off by himself to-day?" he asked; for he was of the party in the hotel which inclined, in spite of the marked difference in profiles, to the relationship theory, and he made a shot at the relationship being that of uncle.

"We haven't got an uncle nearer than England," said Anna-Felicitas affably.

"And we only got him by accident," said Anna-Rose, equally affably.

"It was an unfortunate accident," said Anna-Felicitas, considering her memories.

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "Indeed. How was that?"

"By the usual method, if an uncle isn't a blood uncle," said Anna-Rose. "We happened to have a marriageable aunt, and he married her. So we have to have him."

"It was sheer bad luck," said Anna-Felicitas, again brooding on that distant image.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose. "Just bad luck. He might so easily have married some one else's aunt. But no. His roving glance must needs go and fall on ours."

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "Indeed." And he ruminated on this, with an affectionate eye—he was affectionate—resting in turn on each Anna.

"Yes, isn't he," said Anna-Rose radiantly.

"A boon to the breakfast-table—"

"Yes, isn't he," said Anna-Rose again, all asparkle. "He is so pleasant at breakfast."

"Then he—Mr. Twist—Teapot Twist we call him where I live—"

"Teapot Twist?" said Anna-Rose. "I think that's irreverent."

"Not at all. It's a pet name. A sign of our affection and gratitude. Then he isn't your uncle?"

"We haven't got a real uncle nearer than heaven," said Anna-Felicitas, her cheek on her hand, dreamily reconstructing the image of Onkel Col.

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "Indeed." And he ruminated, on this too, his thirsty heart—he had a thirsty heart, and found difficulty in slaking it because of his wife—very indulgent toward the twins.

Then he said: "That's a long way off."

"What is?" asked Anna-Rose.

"The place your uncle's in."

"Not too far really," said Anna-Felicitas softly. "He's safe there. He was very old, and was difficult to look after. Why, he got there at last through his own carelessness."

"Indeed," said the old gentleman.

"Sheer carelessness," said Anna-Rose.

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "How was that?"

"Well, you see where we lived they didn't have electric light," began Anna-Rose, "and one night—the the night he went to heaven—he put the petroleum lamp—"

That evening, while the twins were undressing, a message came up from the office that the manager would be obliged if the Miss Twinklers' canary wouldn't sing.

"But it can't help it," said Anna-Felicitas through the crack of door she held open; she was already in her nightgown. "You wouldn't either if you were a canary," she added, reasoning with the messenger.

"It's just got to help it," said he.

"But why shouldn't it sing?"

"Complaints."

"But it always has sung."

"That is so. And it has sung once too often. It's unpopular in this hotel, that canary of yours. It's just got to rest a while. Take it easy. Sit quiet on its perch and think."

"But it won't sit quiet and think."

"Well, I've told you," he said, going away.

Secretly the twins didn't like it. Shocked at its loud behaviour, they had very soon agreed that it was no lady, but Anna-Rose was determined to have it at The Open Arms because of her conviction that no house showing the trail of a woman's hand was without a canary. That, and a workbag. She bought them both the same day. The workbag didn't matter, because it kept quiet; but the canary was a very big, very yellow bird, much bigger and yellower than the frailer canaries of a more exhausted civilization, and quite incapable, unless it was pitch dark, of keeping quiet for a minute. Evidently, as Anna-Felicitas said, it had a great many lungs. Her idea of lungs, in spite of her time among them and similar objects at a hospital, was what it had always been: that they were things like pink macaroni strung across a frame of bones on the principle of a lyre or harp, and producing noises. She thought the canary had unusual numbers of these pink strings, and all of them of the biggest and dearest kind of macaroni.

The other guests at the Cosmopolitan had been rather restive from the first on account of this bird, but felt so indulgent toward its owners, those cute little relations or charges or whatever they were of Teapot Twist's, that they bore its singing without complaint. But on the evening of the day the Annas had the interesting conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Ridding and Miss Heap, two definite complaints were lodged in the office, and one was from Mrs. Ridding and the other was from Miss Heap.

She said nothing really; she merely asked questions; and not one of the questions, now they were put to him, did the manager find he could answer. No doubt everything was all right. Everybody knew about Mr. Twist, and it wasn't likely he would choose an hotel of so high a class to stay in if his relations to the Miss Twinklers were anything but regular. And a lady companion, he understood, was joining the party shortly; and besides, there was the house being got ready, a permanent place of residence he gathered, in which the party would settle down, and experience had taught him that genuine illicitness was never permanent. Still, the manager himself hadn't really cared about the Twinklers since the canary came. He could fill the hotel very easily, and there was no need to accommodate people who spoilt carpets. Also, the moment the least doubt or question arose among his guests, all of whom he knew and most of whom came back regularly every year, as to the social or moral status of any new arrivals, then those arrivals must go. Miss Heap evidently had doubts. Her standard, it is true, was the almost impossibly high one of the unmarried lady of riper years, but Mrs. Ridding, he understood, had doubts too; and once doubts started in an hotel he knew from experience that they ran through it like measles. The time had come for him to act.

Mr. Twist paused with a boot half on. "I'm not bearing it in mind," he said, "because you didn't tell me."

"Oh yes I did, Mr. Twist," said the manager briskly. "It isn't likely I'd make a mistake about that. The rooms are taken every year for this date by the same people. Mrs. Hart of Boston has this one, and Mr. and Mrs.—"

Mr. Twist heard no more. He finished lacing his boots in silence. What he had been so much afraid of had happened: he and the twins had got under a cloud.

By superhuman exertions and a lavish expenditure of money, the rooms Li Koo was later on to inhabit were ready to be slept in by the time Mrs. Bilton arrived. They were in an outbuilding at the back of the house, and consisted of a living-room with a cooking-stove in it, a bedroom behind it, and up a narrow and curly staircase a larger room running the whole length and width of the shanty. This sounds spacious, but it wasn't. The amount of length and width was small, and it was only just possible to get three camp-beds into it and a washstand. The beds nearly touched each other. Anna-Felicitas thought she and Anna-Rose were going to be regrettably close to Mrs. Bilton in them, and again urged on Mr. Twist's consideration the question of removing Mrs. Bilton from the room by marriage; but Anna-Rose said it was all perfect, and that there was lots of room, and she was sure Mrs. Bilton, used to the camp life so extensively practised in America, would thoroughly enjoy herself.

These young men—they were all young, and very go-ahead—abandoned the main building that day to the undirected labours of the workmen they were supposed to control, and turned to on the shanty as soon as they realized what it was to be used for with a joyous energy that delighted the twins. They swept and they garnished. They cleaned the dust off the windows and the rust off the stove. They fetched out the parcels with the curtains and cushions in them from the barn where all parcels and packages had been put till the house was ready, and extracted various other comforts from the piled up packing-cases,—a rug or two, an easy chair for Mrs. Bilton, a looking-glass. They screwed in hooks behind the doors for clothes to be hung on, and they tied the canary to a neighbouring eucalyptus tree where it could be seen and hardly heard. The chief plumber found buckets and filled them with water, and the electrical expert rigged up a series of lanterns inside the shanty, even illuminating its tortuous staircase. There was much badinage, but as it was all in American, a language of which the twins were not yet able to apprehend the full flavour, they responded only with pleasant smiles. But their smiles were so pleasant and the family dimple so engaging that the hours flew, and the young men were sorry indeed when Mr. Twist came back.

They were sitting on the stump of an oak tree when he arrived, resting from their labours, and the grass at their feet was dotted with the four experts. It was the twins now who were talking, and the experts who were smiling. Mr. Twist wondered uneasily what they were saying. It wouldn't have added to his comfort if he had heard, for they were giving the experts an account of their attempt to go and live with the Sacks, and interweaving with it some general reflections of a philosophical nature suggested by the Sack ménage

It was only a fortnight after this that the inn was ready to be opened, and it was only during the first days of this fortnight that the party in the shanty had to endure any serious discomfort. The twins didn't mind the physical discomfort at all; what they minded, and began to mind almost immediately, was the spiritual discomfort of being at such close quarters with Mrs. Bilton. They hardly noticed the physical side of that close association in such a lovely climate, where the whole of out-of-doors can be used as one's living-room; and their morning dressing, a difficult business in the shanty for anybody less young and more needing to be careful, was rather like the getting up of a dog after its night's sleep—they seemed just to shake themselves, and there they were.

They got up before Mrs. Bilton, who was, however, always awake and talking to them while they dressed, and they went to bed before she did, though she came up with them after the first night and read aloud to them while they undressed; so that as regarded the mysteries of Mrs. Bilton's toilette they were not, after all, much in her way. It was like caravaning or camping out: you managed your movements and moments skilfully, and if you were Mrs. Bilton you had a curtain slung across your part of the room, in case your younger charges shouldn't always be asleep when they looked as if they were.

Still, Mrs. Bilton was an undoubted find, and did immediately in those rushed days take the Annas off his mind. He could leave them with her in the comfortable certitude that whatever else they did to Mrs. Bilton they couldn't talk to her. Never would she know the peculiar ease of the Twinkler attitude toward subjects Americans approach with care. Never would they be able to tell her things about Uncle Arthur, the kind of things that had caused the Cosmopolitan to grow so suddenly cool. There was, most happily for this particular case, no arguing with Mrs. Bilton. The twins couldn't draw her out because she was already, as it were, so completely out. This was a great thing, Mr. Twist felt, and made up for any personal suffocation he had to bear; and when on the afternoon of Mrs. Bilton's first day the twins appeared without her in the main building in search of him, having obviously given her the slip, and said they were sorry to disturb him but they wanted his advice, for though they had been trying hard all day, remembering they were ladies and practically hostesses, they hadn't yet succeeded in saying anything at all to Mrs. Bilton and doubted whether they ever would, he merely smiled happily at them and said to Anna-Rose, "See how good comes out of evil"—a remark that they didn't like when they had had time to think over it.

The twins were profoundly bored by her psyche, chiefly because they didn't know what part of her it was, and it was no use asking for she didn't answer; but they listened with real interest to her concrete experiences, and especially to the experiences connected with Mr. Bilton. They particularly wished to ask questions about Mr. Bilton, and find out what he had thought of things. Mrs. Bilton was lavish in her details of what she had thought herself, but Mr. Bilton's thoughts remained impenetrable. It seemed to the twins that he must have thought a lot, and have come to the conclusion that there was much to be said for death.

Mr. Twist, his mind at ease, was in the charming room that was to be the tea-room. It was full of scattered fittings and the noise of hammering, but even so anybody could see what a delightful place it would presently turn into.

The Open Arms was to make a specialty of wet days. Those were the days, those consecutive days of downpour that came in the winter and lasted without interruption for a fortnight at a time, when visitors in the hotels were bored beyond expression and ready to welcome anything that could distract them for an hour from the dripping of the rain on the windows. Bridge was their one solace, and they played it from after breakfast till bedtime; but on the fourth or fifth day of doing this, just the mere steady sitting became grievous to them. They ached with weariness. They wilted with boredom. All their natural kindness got damped out of them, and they were cross. Even when they won they were cross, and when they lost it was really distressing. They wouldn't, of course, have been in California at all at such a time if it were possible to know beforehand when the rains would begin, but one never did know, and often it was glorious weather right up to and beyond Christmas. And then how glorious! What a golden place of light and warmth to be in, while in the East one's friends were being battered by blizzards.

He looked round and saw the Annas picking their way toward him. They seemed in a hurry.

"Hello," he called out.

They made no reply to this, but continued hurriedly to pick their way among the obstacles in their path. They appeared to be much perturbed. What, he wondered, had they done with Mrs. Bilton? He soon knew.

"We've given Mrs. Bilton notice," panted Anna-Rose as soon as she got near enough to his ear for him to hear her in the prevailing noise.

Her face, as usual when she was moved and excited, was scarlet, her eyes looking bluer and brighter than ever by contrast.

"We simply can't stand it any longer," she went on as Mr. Twist only stared at her.

"And you wouldn't either if you were us," she continued, the more passionately as he still didn't say anything.

This was the last of Mr. Twist's worries before the opening day.

"You must turn to on this last lap and help fix them up," he said to the twins. "It'll be a bit uncomfortable at first, but you must just take off your coats to it and not mind."

Mind? Turn to? It was what they were languishing for. It was what, in the arid hours under the ilex tree, collected so ignominiously round Mrs. Bilton's knee they had been panting for, like thirsty dogs with their tongues out. And such is the peculiar blessedness of work that instantly, the moment there was any to be done, everything that was tangled and irritating fell quite naturally into its proper place. Magically life straightened itself out smooth, and left off being difficult. Arbeit und Liebe, as their mother used to say, dropping into German whenever a sentence seemed to her to sound better that way—Arbeit und Liebe: these were the two great things of life; the two great angels, as she assured them, under whose spread-out wings lay happiness.

When Mr. Twist, as he did whenever he could, came and looked on for a moment in his shirt sleeves, with his hat on the back of his head and his big, benevolent spectacles so kind, Anna-Rose's cup seemed full. Her dimple never disappeared for a moment. It was there all day long now; and even when she was asleep it still lurked in the corner of her mouth. Arbeit und Liebe.

Immense was the reaction of self-respect that took hold of the twins. They couldn't believe they were the people who had been so crude and ill-conditioned as to hide Mrs. Bilton's belongings, and actually finally to hide themselves. How absurd. How like children. How unpardonably undignified. Anna-Rose held forth volubly to this effect while she arranged the china, and Anna-Felicitas listened assentingly, with a kind of grave, ashamed sheepishness.

People were so much preoccupied by the Twinkler problem that they were less interested than they otherwise would have been in the sea-blue advertisements, and when the one appeared announcing that The Open Arms would open wide on the 29th of the month and exhorting the public to watch the signposts, they merely remarked that it wasn't, then, the title of a book after all. Mr. Twist would have been surprised and nettled if he had known how little curiosity his advertisements were exciting; he would have been horrified if he had known the reason. As it was, he didn't know anything. He was too busy, too deeply absorbed, to be vulnerable to rumour; he, and the twins, and Mrs. Bilton were safe from it inside their magic circle of Arbeit und Liebe.

Sometimes he was seen in Main Street, that street in Acapulco through which everybody passes at certain hours of the morning, looking as though he had a great deal to do and very little time to do it in; and once or twice the Twinklers were seen there, also apparently very busy, but they didn't now come alone. Mrs. Bilton, the lady from Los Angeles—Acapulco knew all about her and admitted she was a lady of strictest integrity and unimpeachable character, but this only made the Twinkler problem more obscure—came too, and seemed, judging from the animation of her talk, to be on the best of terms with her charges.

"Say," interrupted his friend, "since when have you joined up with the water-blooded believe-nothing-but-good-ites?"

And only his personal affection for the lawyer restrained him from using the terrible word pro-German; but it had been in his mind.

She had to wait over a fortnight for the answer, and by the time she got it those other more terrible doubts had arisen, the doubts as to the exact position occupied by the Twinklers and Mr. Twist in the German secret plans for, first, the pervasion, and, second, the invasion of America; and on reading the opening lines of the letter Miss Heap found she had to sit down, for her legs gave way beneath her.

"It's perfect," said the twins, looking round the tea-room.

This was next day, at a quarter to four. They had been looking round saying it was perfect at intervals since the morning. Each time they finished getting another of the little tables ready, each time they brought in and set down another bowl of flowers they stood back and gazed a moment in silence, and then said with one voice, "It's perfect."

Mr. Twist, though the house was not, as we have seen, quite as sober, quite as restrained in its effect as he had intended, was obliged to admit that it did look very pretty. And so did the Annas. Especially the Annas. They looked so pretty in the sea-blue frocks and little Dutch caps and big muslin aprons that he took off his spectacles and cleaned them carefully so as to have a thoroughly uninterrupted view; and as they stood at a quarter to four gazing round the room, he stood gazing at them, and when they said "It's perfect," he said, indicating them with his thumb, "Same here," and then they all laughed for they were all very happy, and Mrs. Bilton, arrayed exactly as Mr. Twist had pictured her when he engaged her in handsome black, her white hair beautifully brushed and neat, crossed over to the Annas and gave each of them a hearty kiss—for luck, she said—which Mr. Twist watched with an odd feeling of jealousy.

"I don't think it would afford you any permanent satisfaction," said Anna-Felicitas placidly. "There's nothing really to be gained, we think, by kissing. Of course," she added politely to Mrs. Bilton, "we like it very much as an expression of esteem."

"Then why not in that spirit—" began Mr. Twist.

"We don't hold with kissing," said Anna-Rose quickly, turning very red. Intolerable to be kissed en famille. If it had to be done at all, kissing should be done quietly, she thought. But she and Anna-Felicitas didn't hold with it anyhow. Never. Never. To her amazement she found tears in her eyes. Well, of all the liquid idiots.... It must be that she was so happy. She had never been so happy. Where on earth had her handkerchief got to....

"Hello," said Mr. Twist, staring at her.

Anna-Felicitas looked at her quickly.

"It's merely bliss," she said, taking the corner of her beautiful new muslin apron to Christopher's eyes. "Excess of it. We are, you know," she said, smiling over her shoulder at Mr. Twist, so that the corner of her apron, being undirected, began dabbing at Christopher's perfectly tearless ears, "quite extraordinarily happy, and all through you. Nevertheless Anna-R." she continued, addressing her with firmness while she finished her eyes and began her nose, "You may like to be reminded that there's only ten minutes left now before all those cars that were here yesterday come again, and you wouldn't wish to embark on your career as a waitress hampered by an ugly face, would you?"

At half-past four the personnel of The Open Arms was sitting about silently in a state of increasing uneasiness, when Mr. Ridding walked in.

There had been no noise of a car to announce him; he just walked in mopping his forehead, for he had come in the jitney omnibus to the nearest point and had done the last mile on his own out-of-condition feet. Mrs. Ridding thought he was writing letters in the smoking-room. She herself was in a big chair on the verandah, and with Miss Heap and most of the other guests was discussing The Open Arms in all its probable significance. He hadn't been able to get away sooner because of the nap. He had gone through with the nap from start to finish so as not to rouse suspicion. He arrived very hot, but with a feeling of dare-devil running of risks that gave him great satisfaction. He knew that he would cool down again presently and that then the consequences of his behaviour would be unpleasant to reflect upon, but meanwhile his blood was up.

He walked in feeling not a day older than thirty,—most gratifying sensation. The personnel, after a moment's open-mouthed surprise, rushed to greet him. Never was a man more welcome. Never had Mr. Ridding been so warmly welcomed anywhere in his life.

"Will you have tea or coffee?" asked Anna-Felicitas, trying to look very solemn and like a family butler but her voice quivering with eagerness. "Or perhaps you would prefer frothed chocolate? Each of these beverages can be provided either hot or iced—"

"There's ice-cream as well," said Anna-Rose, tumultuously in spite of also trying to look like a family butler. "I'd have ice-cream if I were you. There's more body in it. Cold, delicious body. And you look so hot. Hot things should always as soon as possible be united to cold things, so as to restore the proper balance—"

"And there's some heavenly stuff called cinnamon-toast—hot, you know, but if you have ice-cream at the same time it won't matter," said Anna-Felicitas, hanging up his hat for him. "I don't know whether you've studied the leaflets," she continued, "but in case you haven't I feel I oughtn't to conceal from you that the price is five dollars whatever you have."

"So that," said Anna-Rose, "you needn't bother about trying to save, for you can't."

"Then I'll have tea to start with and see how I get on," said Mr. Ridding, sitting down in the chair Anna-Felicitas held for him and beaming up at her.

She flicked an imaginary grain of dust off the cloth with the corner of her apron to convey to him that she knew her business, and hurried away to give the order. Indeed, they both hurried away to give the order.

That evening depression reigned in The Open Arms.

Mr. Twist paced up and down the tea-room deep in thought that was obviously unpleasant and perplexed; Mrs. Bilton went to bed abruptly, after a short outpour of words to the effect that she had never seen so many Germans at once before, that her psyche was disharmonious to Germans, that they made her go goose-fleshy just as cats in a room made Mr. Bilton go goose-fleshy in the days when he had flesh to go it with, that she hadn't been aware the inn was to be a popular resort and rendezvous for Germans, and that she wished to speak alone with Mr. Twist in the morning; while the twins, feeling the ominousness of this last sentence,—as did Mr. Twist, who started when he heard it,—and overcome by the lassitude that had succeeded the shocks of the afternoon, a lassitude much increased by their having tried to finish up the pailsful of left-over ices and the huge piles of cakes slowly soddening in their own souring cream, went out together on to the moonlit verandah and stood looking up in silence at the stars. There they stood in silence, and thought things about the immense distance and indifference of those bright, cold specks, and how infinitely insignificant after all they, the Twinklers were, and how they would both in any case be dead in a hundred years. And this last reflection afforded them somehow a kind of bleak and draughty comfort.

Out of the corner of his eye every time he passed the open door on to the verandah he could see the two Annas standing motionless on its edge, their up-turned faces, as they gazed at the stars, white in the moonlight and very serious. Pathetic children. Pathetic, solitary, alien children. What were they thinking of? He wouldn't mind betting it was their mother.

In the office Anna-Rose found Mr. Twist walking up and down.

"See here," he said, turning on her when she came in, "I'm about tired of looking on at all this twittering round that lot in there. You're through with that for to-day, and maybe for to-morrow and the day after as well."

He waved his arm at the deep chair that had been provided for his business meditations. "You'll sit down in that chair now," he said severely, "and stay put."

Anna-Rose looked at him with a quivering lip. She went rather unsteadily to the chair and tumbled into it. "I don't know if you're angry or being kind," she said tremulously, "but whichever it is I—I wish you wouldn't. I—I wish you'd manage to be something that isn't either." And, as she had feared, she began to cry.

"Anna-Rose," said Mr. Twist, staring down at her in concern mixed with irritation—out there all those Germans, in here the weeping child; what a day he was having—"for heaven's sake don't do that."

"I know," sobbed Anna-Rose. "I don't want to. It's awful being so natu—natu—naturally liquid."

"But what's the matter?" asked Mr. Twist helplessly.

"Nothing," sobbed Anna-Rose.

"You're overtired," he said aloofly. "That's what you are."

"No," sobbed Anna-Rose.

"And the Germans have been too much for you."

"They haven't," sobbed Anna-Rose, her pride up at the suggestion that anybody could ever be that.

"But they're not going to get the chance again," said Mr. Twist, setting his teeth as much as they would set, which wasn't, owing to his natural kindliness, anything particular. "Mrs. Bilton and me—" Then he remembered Anna-Felicitas. "Why doesn't she come?" he asked.

"Who?" choked Anna-Rose.

"The other one. Anna II. Columbus."

"I haven't seen her for ages," sobbed Anna-Rose, who had been much upset by Anna-Felicitas's prolonged disappearance and had suspected her, though she couldn't understand it after last night's finishings up, of secret unworthy conduct in a corner with ice-cream.

Mr. Twist went to the door quickly and looked through. "I can't see her either," he said. "Confound them—what have they done to her? Worn her out too, I daresay. I shouldn't wonder if she'd crawled off somewhere and were crying too."

"Anna-F.—doesn't crawl," sobbed Anna-Rose, "and she—doesn't cry but—I wish you'd find—her."

"Well, will you stay where you are while I'm away, then?" he said, looking at her from the door uncertainly.

"You little bit of blessedness," murmured Mr. Twist before he knew what he was saying; at which her sobs grew louder than ever,—grew, indeed, almost into small howls, so long was it since anybody had said things like that to her. It was her mother who used to say things like that; things almost exactly like that.

"Hush," said Mr. Twist in much distress, and with one anxious eye on the half-open door, for Anna-Rose's sobs were threatening to outdo the noise of teacups and ice-cream plates, "hush, hush—here's a clean handkerchief—you just wipe up your eyes while I fetch Anna II. She'll worry, you know, if she sees you like this,—hush now, hush—there, there—and I expect she's being miserable enough already, hiding away in some corner. You wouldn't like to make her more miserable, would you—"

And he pressed the handkerchief into Anna-Rose's hands, and feeling much flurried went away to search for the other one who was somewhere, he was sure, in a state of equal distress.

That night he determined he would go into Acapulco next morning and drop in at his bank and at his lawyer's and other places, and see if he could pick up anything that would explain why Americans wouldn't come and have tea at The Open Arms. He even thought he might look up old Ridding. He didn't sleep. He lay all night thinking.

The evening had been spent tête-à-tête with Anna-Felicitas. Anna-Rose was in bed, sleeping off her tears; Mrs. Bilton had another headache, and disappeared early; so he was left with Anna-Felicitas, who slouched about abstractedly eating up the remains of ice-cream. She didn't talk, except once to remark a little pensively that her inside was dreadfully full of cold stuff, and that she knew now what it must feel like to be a mausoleum; but, eyeing her sideways as he sat before the fire, Mr. Twist could see that she was still smug. He didn't talk either. He felt he had nothing at present to say to Anna-Felicitas that would serve a useful purpose, and was, besides, reluctant to hear any counter-observations she might make. Watchfulness was what was required. Silent watchfulness. And wariness. And firmness. In fact all the things that were most foreign to his nature, thought Mr. Twist, resentful and fatigued.

He turned a corner in the lane and saw some way down it two figures, a man and a girl, sitting in the grass by the wayside. Lovers, of course. "Oh yes—I daresay," said Mr. Twist again, grimly. They hadn't to deal with Twinklers either. No wonder they could sit happily in the grass. So could he, if—

At the noise of the approaching car, with the smile of the last thing they had been saying still on their faces, the two turned their heads, and it was that man Elliott and Anna-Felicitas.

"Hello," called out Mr. Twist, putting on the brakes so hard that the Ford skidded sideways along the road towards them.

"Hello," said the young man cheerfully, waving his stick.

She had no hat on, and had evidently escaped from Mrs. Bilton just as she was. Escaped, however, was far too violent a word Mr. Twist felt; sauntered from Mrs. Bilton better described her effect of natural and comfortable arrival at the place where she was.

Meanwhile Mr. Twist had driven on towards Acapulco in a state of painful indecision. Should he or shouldn't he take a turning he knew of a couple of miles farther that led up an unused and practically undrivable track back by the west side to The Open Arms, and instruct Mrs. Bilton to proceed at once down the lane and salvage Anna-Felicitas? Should he or shouldn't he? For the first mile he decided he would; then, as his anger cooled, he began to think that after all he needn't worry much. The Annas were lucidly too young for serious philandering, and even if that Elliott didn't realize this, owing to Anna-Felicitas's great length, he couldn't do much before he, Mr. Twist, was back again along the lane. In this he under-estimated the enterprise of the British Navy, but it served to calm him; so that when he did reach the turning he had made up his mind to continue on his way to Acapulco.

There he spent some perplexing and harassing hours.

From the bank, where he picked up nothing in the way of explanation of the American avoidance of The Open Arms, the manager going dumb at its mere mention, he went to the solicitors who had arranged the sale of the inn, and again in the street people he knew looked the other way. The solicitor, it appeared, wouldn't be back till the afternoon, and the clerk, an elderly person hitherto subservient, was curiously short about it.

By this time Mr. Twist was thoroughly uneasy, and he determined to ask the first acquaintance he met what the matter was. But he couldn't find anybody. Every one, his architect, his various experts—those genial and frolicsome young men—were either engaged or away on business somewhere else. He set his teeth, and drove to the Cosmopolitan to seek out old Ridding—it wasn't a place he drove to willingly after his recent undignified departure, but he was determined to get to the bottom of this thing—and walking into the parlour was instantly aware of a hush falling upon it, a holding of the breath.

He couldn't face those eyes. He did try to, and hesitated while he tried, and then he found he couldn't; so he swerved away to the right, and went out quickly by the side door.

There was now one other person left who would perhaps clear him up as to the meaning of all this, and he was the lawyer he had gone to about the guardianship. True he had been angry with him at the time, but that was chiefly because he had been angry with himself. At bottom he had carried away an impression of friendliness. To this man he would now go as a last resource before turning back home, and once more he raced up Main Street in his Ford, producing by these repeated appearances an effect of agitation and restlessness that wasn't lost on the beholders.

The lawyer was in his office, and disengaged. After his morning's experience Mr. Twist was quite surprised and much relieved by being admitted at once. He was received neither coldly nor warmly, but with unmistakable interest.

"I've come to consult you," said Mr. Twist.

"I want a straight answer to a straight question," said Mr. Twist, his great spectacles glaring anxiously at the lawyer who again nodded.

"Go on," he said, as Mr. Twist paused.

"What I want to know is," burst out Mr. Twist, "what the hell—"

The lawyer put up a hand. "One moment, Mr. Twist," he said. "Sorry to interrupt—"

Wife. The word had a remarkable effect on him. It churned him all up. His thoughts were a chaotic jumble, and his driving on the way home matched them. He had at least three narrow shaves at cross streets before he got out of the town and for an entire mile afterwards he was on the wrong side of the road. During this period, deep as he was in confused thought, he couldn't but vaguely notice the anger on the faces of the other drivers and the variety and fury of their gesticulations, and it roused a dim wonder in him.

Wife. How arid existence had been for him up to then in regard to the affections, how knobbly the sort of kisses he had received in Clark. They weren't kisses; they were disapproving pecks. Always disapproving. Always as if he hadn't done enough, or been enough, or was suspected of not going to do or be enough.

His wife. Mr. Twist dreadfully longed to kiss somebody,—somebody kind and soft, who would let herself be adored. She needn't even love him,—he knew he wasn't the sort of man to set passion alight; she need only be kind, and a little fond of him, and let him love her, and be his very own.

His own little wife. How sweet. How almost painfully sweet. Yes. But the Annas....

Mr. Twist's dampness increased, and a passing car got his mud-guard. It was a big car which crackled with language as it whizzed on its way, and Mr. Twist, slewed by the impact half across the road, then perceived on which side he had been driving.

The lane up to the inn was in its middle-day emptiness and somnolence. Where Anna-Felicitas and Elliott had been sitting cool and shaded when he passed before, there was only the pressed-down grass and crushed flowers in a glare of sun. She had gone home long ago of course. She said she was going to be very busy. Secretly he wished she hadn't gone home, and that little Christopher too might for a bit be somewhere else, so that when he arrived he wouldn't immediately have to face everybody at once. He wanted to think; he wanted to have time to think; time before four o'clock came, and with four o'clock, if he hadn't come to any conclusion about shutting up the inn—and how could he if nobody gave him time to think?—those accursed, swarming Germans. It was they who had done all this. Mr. Twist blazed into sudden fury. They and their blasted war....

"Oh," cried out Anna-Rose the instant he pulled up, for she had waved to him to stop when he tried to drive straight on round to the stable, "she isn't with you?"

"Who isn't?" asked Mr. Twist.

Anna-Rose became paler than ever. "She has been kidnapped," she said.

"How's that?" said Mr. Twist, staring at her from the car.

"Kidnapped," she said again, wringing her hands.

"Hadn't you better have lunch first?" he asked, though he knew from the look on her face that she wouldn't. It was a very remarkable look. It was as though an angel, dwelling in perfect bliss, had unaccountably got its feet wet. Not more troubled than that; a little troubled, but not more than that.

"No thank you," she said politely. "But if you've finished yours, do you mind coming into the office? Because otherwise Mrs. Bilton—"

"She's fetching me some brandy," said Mr. Twist.

"I didn't know you drank," said Anna-Felicitas, even at this moment interested. "But do you mind having it afterwards? Because otherwise Mrs. Bilton—"

"I guess the idea was to have it first," said Mr. Twist.

She was however already making for the tea-room, proceeding towards it without hurry, and with a single-mindedness that would certainly get her there.

He could only follow.

In the office she said, "Do you mind shutting the door?"

"Christopher—" began Anna-Felicitas, directly he had shut the door.

"I know. She's mad with you. What can you expect, Anna II.?" he interrupted in a very matter-of-fact voice, leaning against a bookcase. Even a bookcase was better than nothing to lean against.

"Christopher is being unreasonable," said Anna-Felicitas, her voice softer and gentler than he had yet heard it.

Then she stopped, and considered him a moment with much of the look of one who on a rather cold day considers the sea before diving in—with, that is, a slight but temporary reluctance to proceed.

"Won't you sit down?" said Mr. Twist.

"Perhaps I'd better," she said, disposing herself in the big chair. "It's very strange, but my legs feel funny. You wouldn't think being in love would make one want to sit down."

"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Twist.

"I have fallen in love," said Anna-Felicitas, looking up at him with a kind of pensive radiance. "I did it this morning."

Mr. Twist stared at her. "I beg your—what did you say?" he asked.

She said, still with that air as she regarded him of pensive radiance, of not seeing him but something beyond him that was very beautiful to her and satisfactory, "I've fallen in love, and I can't tell you how pleased I am because I've always been afraid I was going to find it a difficult thing to do. But it wasn't. Quite the contrary."

And having said this she lapsed into what was apparently, judging from her expression, a silent contemplation of her bliss.

"But you're too young," burst out Mr. Twist.

"Too young?" repeated Anna-Felicitas, coming out of her contemplation for a moment to smile at him. "We don't think so."

Well. This beat everything.

Mr. Twist could only stare down at her.

He went straight in search of Anna-Rose.

He was going to propose to her. He couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear the idea of his previous twins, his blessed little Twinklers, both going out of his life at the same time, and he couldn't bear, after what he had just seen in the office, the loneliness of being left outside love.

Avoiding the verandah and Mrs. Bilton, Mr. Twist filled with recklessness, hurried upstairs and knocked at Anna-Rose's door. No answer. He listened. Dead silence. He opened it a slit and peeped in. Emptiness. Down he went again and made for the kitchen, because Li Koo, who always knew everything, might know where she was. Li Koo did. He jerked his head towards the window, and Mr. Twist hurried to it and looked out. There in the middle of the yard was the cat, exactly where he had left her an hour before, and kneeling beside her stroking her stomach was Anna-Rose.

She had her back to the house and her face was hidden. The sun streamed down on her bare head and on the pale gold rings of hair that frisked round her neck. She didn't hear him till he was close to her, so much absorbed was she apparently in the cat; and when she did she didn't look up, but bent her head lower than before and stroked more assiduously.

"Anna-Rose," said Mr. Twist.

"Yes."

"Come and talk to me."

"I'm thinking."

"Don't think. Come and talk to me, little—little dear one."

She bent her head lower still. "I'm thinking," she said again.

"Come and tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm thinking about cats."

"About cats?" said Mr. Twist, uncertainly.

"Well then if that's all, you can go on with that presently and come and talk to me now."

"You see," said Anna-Rose, not heeding this, "they're invariably twins, and more than twins, for they're often fours and sometimes sixes, but still they sit in the sun quietly all their lives and don't mind a bit what their—what their twins do—"

"Ah," said Mr. Twist. "Now I'm getting there."

"They don't mind a bit about anything. They just clean their whiskers and they purr. Perhaps it's that that comforts them. Perhaps if I—if I had whiskers and a—and a purr—"

The cat leaped suddenly to her feet and shook herself violently. Something hot and wet had fallen on her beautiful stomach.

Anna-Rose made a little sound strangers might have taken for a laugh as she put out her arms and caught her again, but it was a sound so wretched, so piteous in the attempt to hide away from him, that Mr. Twist's heart stood still. "Oh, don't go," she said, catching at the cat and hugging her tight, "I can't let you go—" And she buried her face in her fur, so that Mr. Twist still couldn't see it.

"Now that's enough about the cat," he said, speaking very firmly. "You're coming with me." And he stooped and picked her up, cat and all, and set her on her feet.

Then he saw her face.

"Good God, Anna-Rose!" he exclaimed.