Christopher and Columbus

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

AMERICA

There were other words on its back, but this one alone stood out, and it had all the effect of a revelation.

There. That was it. Of course. That was the way out. Why the devil hadn't Alice thought of that? He knew some Americans; he didn't like them, but he knew them; and he would write to them, or Alice would write to them, and tell them the twins were coming. He would give the twins £200,—damn it, nobody could say that wasn't handsome, especially in war-time, and for a couple of girls who had no earthly sort of claim on him, whatever Alice might choose to think they had on her. Yet it was such a confounded mixed-up situation that he wasn't at all sure he wouldn't come under the Defence of the Realm Act, by giving them money, as aiding the enemy. Well, he would risk that. He would risk anything to be rid of them. Ship 'em off, that was the thing to do. They would fall on their feet right enough over there. America still swallowed Germans without making a face.

Uncle Arthur reflected for a moment with extreme disgust on the insensibility of the American palate. "Lost their chance, that's what they've done," he said to himself—for this was 1916, and America had not yet made her magnificent entry into the war—as he had already said to himself a hundred times. "Lost their chance of coming in on the side of civilization, and helping sweep the world up tidy of barbarism. Shoulder to shoulder with us, that's where they ought to have been. English-speaking races—duty to the world—" He then damned the Americans; but was suddenly interrupted by perceiving that if they had been shoulder to shoulder with him and England he wouldn't have been able to send them his wife's German nieces to take care of. There was, he conceded, that advantage resulting from their attitude. He could not, however, concede any others.

At luncheon he was very nearly gay. It was terrible to see Uncle Arthur very nearly gay, and both his wife and the twins were most uncomfortable. "I wonder what's the matter now," sighed Aunt Alice to herself, as she nervously crumbled her toast.

It could mean nothing good, Arthur in such spirits on a wet Sunday, when he hadn't been able to get his golf and the cook had overdone the joint.

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CHAPTER III

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.

For they loved England. They loved it with the love of youth whose enthusiasms have been led by an adored teacher always in one direction. And they were leaving that adored teacher, their mother, in England. It seemed like losing her a second time to go away, so far away, and leave her there. It was nonsense, they knew, to feel like that. She was with them just the same; wherever they went now she would be with them, and they could hear her saying at that very moment, "Little darlings, don't cry...." But it was a gloomy, drizzling afternoon, the sort of afternoon anybody might be expected to cry on, and not one of the people waving handkerchiefs were waving handkerchiefs to them.

"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?"

And she drew Anna-Felicitas away to the chairs, and when they were safely in them and rolled up to their chins in the rug, she added, "That man—" and then stopped. "What man?"

"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.?"

For Anna-Felicitas was very pretty. In most people's eyes she was very pretty, but in Anna-Rose's she was the most exquisite creature God had yet succeeded in turning out. Anna-Rose concealed this conviction from her. She wouldn't have told her for worlds. She considered it wouldn't have been at all good for her; and she had, up to this, and ever since they could both remember, jeered in a thoroughly sisterly fashion at her defects, concentrating particularly on her nose, on her leanness, and on the way, unless constantly reminded not to, she drooped.

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.

But she found tact a ticklish thing, the most difficult thing of all to handle successfully; and on this occasion hers was so elaborate, and so carefully wrapped up in Scriptural language, and German Scripture at that, that Anna-Felicitas's slow mind didn't succeed in disentangling her meaning, and after a space of staring at her with a mild inquiry in her eyes, she decided that perhaps she hadn't got one. She was much too polite though, to say so, and they sat in silence under the rug till the St. Luke whistled and stopped, and Anna-Rose began hastily to make conversation about Christopher and Columbus.

She was ashamed of having shown so much of her woe at leaving England. She hoped Anna-Felicitas hadn't noticed. She certainly wasn't going on like that. When the St. Luke whistled, she was ashamed that it wasn't only Anna-Felicitas who jumped. And the amount of brightness she put into her voice when she told Anna-Felicitas it was pleasant to go and discover America was such that that young lady, who if slow was sure, said to herself, "Poor little Anna-R., she's really taking it dreadfully to heart."

The St. Luke was only dropping anchor for the night in the Mersey, and would go on at daybreak. They gathered this from the talk of passengers walking up and down the deck in twos and threes and passing and repassing the chairs containing the silent figures with the round heads that might be either the heads of boys or of girls, and they were greatly relieved to think they wouldn't have to begin and be sea-sick for some hours yet. "So couldn't we walk about a little?" suggested Anna-Felicitas, who was already stiff from sitting on the hard cane chair.

But Aunt Alice had told them that the thing to do on board a ship if they wished, as she was sure they did, not only to avoid being sick but also conspicuous, was to sit down in chairs the moment the ship got under way, and not move out of them till it stopped again. "Or, at least, as rarely as possible," amended Aunt Alice, who had never herself been further on a ship than to Calais, but recognized that it might be difficult to avoid moving sooner or later if it was New York you were going to. "Two such young girls travelling alone should be seen as seldom as ever you can manage. Your Uncle is sending you second-class for that very reason, because it is so much less conspicuous."

It was also very much less expensive, and Uncle Arthur's generosities were of the kind that suddenly grow impatient and leave off. Just as in eating he was as he said, for plain roast and boiled, and messes be damned, so in benefactions he was for lump sums and done with it; and the extras, the driblets, the here a little and there a little that were necessary, or were alleged by Aunt Alice to be necessary, before he finally got rid of those blasted twins, annoyed him so profoundly that when it came to taking their passage he could hardly be got not to send them in the steerage. This was too much, however, for Aunt Alice, whose maid was going with them as far as Euston and therefore would know what sort of tickets they had, and she insisted with such quiet obstinacy that they should be sent first-class that Uncle Arthur at last split the difference and consented to make it second. To her maid Aunt Alice also explained that second-class was less conspicuous.

Anna-Rose, mindful of Aunt Alice's words, hesitated as to the wisdom of walking about and beginning to be conspicuous already, but she too was stiff, and anything the matter with one's body has a wonderful effect, as she had already in her brief career had numerous occasions to observe, in doing away with prudent determinations. So, after cautiously looking round the corners to see if the man who was on the verge of being sorry for them were nowhere in sight, they walked up and down the damp, dark deck; and the motionlessness, and silence, and mist gave them a sensation of being hung mid-air in some strange empty Hades between two worlds.

Far down below there was a faint splash every now and then against the side of the St. Luke when some other steamer, invisible in the mist, felt her way slowly by. Out ahead lay the sea, the immense uneasy sea that was to last ten days and nights before they got to the other side, hour after hour of it, hour after hour of tossing across it further and further away; and forlorn and ghostly as the ship felt, it yet, because on either side of it were still the shores of England, didn't seem as forlorn and ghostly as the unknown land they were bound for. For suppose, Anna-Felicitas inquired of Anna-Rose, who had been privately asking herself the same thing, America didn't like them? Suppose the same sort of difficulties were waiting for them over there that had dogged their footsteps in England?

"First of all," said Anna-Rose promptly, for she prided herself on the readiness and clearness of her explanations, "America will like us, because I don't see why it shouldn't. We're going over to it in exactly the same pleasant spirit, Anna-F.,—and don't you go forgetting it and showing your disagreeable side—that the dove was in when it flew across the waters to the ark, and with olive branches in our beaks just the same as the dove's, only they're those two letters to Uncle Arthur's friends."

"But do you think Uncle Arthur's friends—" began Anna-Felicitas, who had great doubts as to everything connected with Uncle Arthur.

"And secondly," continued Anna-Rose a little louder, for she wasn't going to be interrupted, and having been asked a question liked to give all the information in her power, "secondly, America is the greatest of the neutrals except the liebe Gott, and is bound particularly to prize us because we're so unusually and peculiarly neutral. What ever was more neutral than you and me? We're neither one thing nor the other, and yet at the same time we're both." Anna-Felicitas remarked that it sounded rather as if they were the Athanasian Creed.

"And thirdly," went on Anna-Rose, waving this aside, "there's £200 waiting for us over there, which is a very nice warm thing to think of. We never had £200 waiting for us anywhere in our lives before, did we,—so you remember that, and don't get grumbling."

Anna-Felicitas mildly said that she wasn't grumbling but that she couldn't help thinking what a great deal depended on the goodwill of Uncle Arthur's friends, and wished it had been Aunt Alice's friends they had letters to instead, because Aunt Alice's friends were more likely to like her.

Anna-Rose rebuked her, and said that the proper spirit in which to start on a great adventure was one of faith and enthusiasm, and that one didn't have doubts.

Anna-Felicitas said she hadn't any doubts really, but that she was very hungry, not having had anything that could be called a meal since breakfast, and that she felt like the sheep in "Lycidas," the hungry ones who looked up and were not fed, and she quoted the lines in case Anna-Rose didn't recollect them (which Anna-Rose deplored, for she knew the lines by heart, and if there was any quoting to be done liked to do it herself), and said she felt just like that,—"Empty," said Anna-Felicitas, "and yet swollen. When do you suppose people have food on board ships? I don't believe we'd mind nearly so much about—oh well, about leaving England, if it was after dinner."

"I'm not minding leaving England," said Anna-Rose quickly. "At least, not more than's just proper."

"Oh, no more am I, of course," said Anna-Felicitas airily. "Except what's proper."

"And even if we were feeling it dreadfully," said Anna-Rose, with a little catch in her voice, "which, of course, we're not, dinner wouldn't make any difference. Dinner doesn't alter fundamentals."

"But it helps one to bear them," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Bear!" repeated Anna-Rose, her chin in the air. "We haven't got much to bear. Don't let me hear you talk of bearing things, Anna-F."

"I won't after dinner," promised Anna-Felicitas.

They thought perhaps they had better ask somebody whether there wouldn't soon be something to eat, but the other passengers had all disappeared. They were by themselves on the gloomy deck, and there were no lights. The row of cabin windows along the wall were closely shuttered, and the door they had come through when first they came on deck was shut too, and they couldn't find it in the dark. It seemed so odd to be feeling along a wall for a door they knew was there and not be able to find it, that they began to laugh; and the undiscoverable door cheered them up more than anything that had happened since seeing the last of Uncle Arthur.

"It's like a game," said Anna-Rose, patting her hands softly and vainly along the wall beneath the shuttered windows.

"It's like something in 'Alice in Wonderland,'" said Anna-Felicitas, following in her tracks.

A figure loomed through the mist and came toward them. They left off patting, and stiffened into straight and motionless dignity against the wall till it should have passed. But it didn't pass. It was a male figure in a peaked cap, probably a steward, they thought, and it stopped in front of them and said in an American voice, "Hello."

Anna-Rose cast rapidly about in her mind for the proper form of reply to Hello.

Anna-Felicitas, instinctively responsive to example murmured "Hello" back again.

Anna-Rose, feeling sure that nobody ought to say just Hello to people they had never seen before, and that Aunt Alice would think they had brought it on themselves by being conspicuous, decided that perhaps "Good-evening" would regulate the situation, and said it.

"You ought to be at dinner," said the man, taking no notice of this.

"That's what we think," agreed Anna-Felicitas earnestly.

"Can you please tell us how to get there?" asked Anna-Rose, still distant, but polite, for she too very much wanted to know.

"But don't tell us to ask the Captain," said Anna-Felicitas, even more earnestly.

"No," said Anna-Rose, "because we won't."

The man laughed. "Come right along with me," he said, striding on; and they followed him as obediently as though such persons as possible böse Buben didn't exist.

"First voyage I guess," said the man over his shoulder.

"Yes," said the twins a little breathlessly, for the man's legs were long and they could hardly keep up with him.

"English?" said the man.

"Ye—es," said Anna-Rose.

"That's to say, practically," panted the conscientious Anna-Felicitas.

"What say?" said the man, still striding on. "I said," Anna-Felicitas endeavoured to explain, hurrying breathlessly after him so as to keep within reach of his ear, "practically."

"Ah," said the man; and after a silence, broken only by the pantings for breath of the twins, he added: "Mother with you?"

They didn't say anything to that, it seemed such a dreadful question to have to answer, and luckily he didn't repeat it, but, having got to the door they had been searching for, opened it and stepped into the bright light inside, and putting out his arm behind him pulled them in one after the other over the high wooden door-frame.

Inside was the same stewardess they had seen earlier in the afternoon, engaged in heatedly describing what sounded like grievances to an official in buttons, who seemed indifferent. She stopped suddenly when the man appeared, and the official took his hands out of his pockets and became alert and attentive, and the stewardess hastily picked up a tray she had set down and began to move away along a passage.

The man, however, briefly called "Hi," and she turned round and came back even more quickly than she had tried to go.

"You see," explained Anna-Rose in a pleased whisper to Anna-Felicitas, "it's Hi she answers to."

"Yes," agreed Anna-Felicitas. "It's waste of good circumlocutions to throw them away on her."

"Show these young ladies the dining-room," said the man.

"Yes, sir," said the stewardess, as polite as you please.

He nodded to them with a smile that developed for some reason into a laugh, and turned away and beckoned to the official to follow him, and went out again into the night.

"Who was that nice man?" inquired Anna-Rose, following the stewardess down a broad flight of stairs that smelt of india-rubber and machine-oil and cooking all mixed up together.

"And please," said Anna-Felicitas with mild severity, "don't tell us to ask the Captain, because we really do know better than that."

"I thought you must be relations," said the stewardess.

"We are," said Anna-Rose. "We're twins."

The stewardess stared. "Twins what of?" she asked.

"What of?" echoed Anna-Rose. "Why, of each other, of course."

"I meant relations of the Captain's," said the stewardess shortly, eyeing them with more disfavour than ever.

"You seem to have the Captain greatly on your mind," said Anna-Felicitas. "He is no relation of ours."

"You're not even friends, then?" asked the stewardess, pausing to stare round at them at a turn in the stairs as they followed her down arm-in-arm.

"Of course we're friends," said Anna-Rose with some heat. "Do you suppose we quarrel?"

"No, I didn't suppose you quarrelled with the Captain," said the stewardess tartly. "Not on board this ship anyway."

She didn't know which of the two she disliked most, the short girl or the long girl.

"You seem to be greatly obsessed by the Captain," said Anna-Felicitas gently. "Obsessed!" repeated the stewardess, tossing her head. She was unacquainted with the word, but instantly suspected it of containing a reflection on her respectability. "I've been a widow off and on for ten years now," she said angrily, "and I guess it would take more than even the Captain to obsess me."

They had reached the glass doors leading into the dining-room, and the stewardess, having carried out her orders, paused before indignantly leaving them and going upstairs again to say, "If you're friends, what do you want to know his name for, then?"

"Whose name?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"The Captain's," said the stewardess.

"We don't want to know the Captain's name," said Anna-Felicitas patiently. "We don't want to know anything about the Captain."

"Then—" began the stewardess. She restrained herself, however, and merely bitterly remarking: "That gentleman was the Captain," went upstairs and left them.

Anna-Rose was the first to recover. "You see we took your advice," she called up after her, trying to soften her heart, for it was evident that for some reason her heart was hardened, by flattery. "You told us to ask the Captain."

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CHAPTER IV

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 tips they had seen administered during their short lives had all been given at the end of things, not at the beginning; but Americans, Aunt Alice told them, were in some respects, in spite of their talking English, different, and perhaps they were different just on this point and liked to be tipped at both ends. Anna-Rose wanted to crane out her head and call up to Anna-Felicitas and ask her whether she didn't think that might be so, but was afraid of disturbing the people in the opposite berths.

Anna-Felicitas was in the top berth on their side of the cabin, and Anna-Rose as the elder and accordingly as she explained to Anna-Felicitas, needing more comfort, in the lower one. On the opposite side were two similar berths, each containing as Anna-Felicitas whispered after peeping cautiously through their closed curtains,—for at first on coming in after dinner to go to bed the cabin seemed empty, except for inanimate things, like clothes hanging up and an immense smell,—its human freight. They were awed by this discovery, for the human freight was motionless and speechless, and yet made none of the noises suggesting sleep.

They unpacked and undressed as silently and quickly as possible, but it was very difficult, for there seemed to be no room for anything, not even for themselves. Every now and then they glanced a little uneasily at the closed curtains, which bulged, and sniffed cautiously and delicately, trying to decide what the smell exactly was. It appeared to be a mixture of the sauce one had with plum pudding at Christmas, and German bedrooms in the morning. It was a smell they didn't like the idea of sleeping with, but they saw no way of getting air. They thought of ringing for the stewardess and asking her to open a window, though they could see no window, but came to the conclusion it was better not to stir her up; not yet, at least, not till they had correctly diagnosed what was the matter with her. They said nothing out loud, for fear of disturbing whatever it was behind the curtains, but they knew what each was thinking, for one isn't, as they had long ago found out, a twin for nothing.

There was a slight scuffle before Anna-Felicitas was safely hoisted up into her berth, her legs hanging helplessly down for some time after the rest of her was in it, and Anna-Rose, who had already neatly inserted herself into her own berth, after watching these legs in silence and fighting a desire to give them a tug and see what would happen, had to get out at last on hearing Anna-Felicitas begin to make sounds up there as though she were choking, and push them up in after her. Her head was then on a level with Anna-Felicitas's berth, and she could see how Anna-Felicitas, having got her legs again, didn't attempt to do anything with them in the way of orderly arrangement beneath the blankets, but lay huddled in an irregular heap, screwing her eyes up very tight and stuffing one of her pigtails into her mouth, and evidently struggling with what appeared to be an attack of immoderate and ill-timed mirth.

Anna-Rose observed her for a moment in silence, then was suddenly seized herself with a dreadful desire to laugh, and with a hasty glance round at the bulging curtains scrambled back into her own berth and pulled the sheet over her mouth.

She was sobering herself by going over her different responsibilities, checking them off on her fingers,—the two five-pound notes under her pillow for extra expenses till they were united in New York to their capital, the tickets, the passports, and Anna-Felicitas,—when two thick fair pigtails appeared dangling over the edge of her berth, followed by Anna-Felicitas's head.

"You've forgotten to turn out the light," whispered Anna-Felicitas, her eyelashes still wet from her late attack; and stretching her neck still further down till her face was scarlet with the effort and the blood rushing into it, she expressed a conviction to Anna-Rose that the human freight behind the curtains, judging from the suspicious negativeness of its behaviour, had no business in their cabin at all and was really stowaways.

"German stowaways," added Anna-Felicitas, nodding her head emphatically, which was very skilful of her, thought Anna-Rose, considering that it was upside down. "German stowaways," whispered Anna-Felicitas, sniffing expressively though cautiously.

Anna-Rose raised herself on her elbows and stared across at the bulging curtains. They certainly were very motionless and much curved. In spite of herself her flesh began to creep a little.

"They're men," whispered Anna-Felicitas, now dangerously congested. "Stowaways are."

There had been no one in the cabin when first they came on board and took their things down, and they hadn't been in it since till they came to bed.

"German men," whispered Anna-Felicitas, again with a delicate expressive sniff.

"Nonsense," whispered Anna-Rose, stoutly. "Men never come into ladies' cabins. And there's skirts on the hooks."

"Disguise," whispered Anna-Felicitas, nodding again. "Spies' disguise." She seemed quite to be enjoying her own horrible suggestions.

"Take your head back into the berth," ordered Anna-Rose quickly, for Anna-Felicitas seemed to be on the very brink of an apoplectic fit.

Anna-Felicitas, who was herself beginning to feel a little inconvenienced, obeyed, and was thrilled to see Anna-Rose presently very cautiously emerge from underneath her and on her bare feet creep across to the opposite side. She knew her to be valiant to recklessness. She sat up to watch, her eyes round with interest.

Anna-Rose didn't go straight across, but proceeded slowly, with several pauses, to direct her steps toward the pillow-end of the berths. Having got there she stood still a moment listening, and then putting a careful finger between the curtain of the lower berth and its frame, drew it the smallest crack aside and peeped in.

Instantly she started back, letting go the curtain. "I beg your pardon," she said out loud, turning very red. "I—I thought—"

Anna-Felicitas, attentive in her berth, felt a cold thrill rush down her back. No sound came from the berth on the other side any more than before the raid on it, and Anna-Rose returned quicker than she had gone. She just stopped on the way to switch off the light, and then felt along the edge of Anna-Felicitas's berth till she got to her head, and pulling it near her by its left pigtail whispered with her mouth close to its left ear, "Wide awake. Watching me all the time. Not a man. Fat."

And she crawled into her berth feeling unnerved.

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CHAPTER V

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.

This happened at ten o'clock the next morning when the St. Luke was pitching about off the southwest coast of Ireland. The twins, waking about seven, found with a pained surprise that they were not where they had been dreaming they were, in the sunlit garden at home playing tennis happily if a little violently, but in a chilly yet stuffy place that kept on tilting itself upside down. They lay listening to the groans coming from the opposite berths, and uneasily wondering how long it would be before they too began to groan. Anna-Rose raised her head once with the intention of asking if she could help at all, but dropped it back again on to the pillow and shut her eyes tight and lay as quiet as the ship would let her. Anna-Felicitas didn't even raise her head, she felt so very uncomfortable.

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.

"Come, come," she said, addressing the twins, and through them talking at the heaving and groaning occupants of the other side, "you mustn't give way like this. What you want is to be out of bed. You must get up and go on deck. And how's the cabin to get done if you stay in it all the time?"

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.

Then the St. Luke whistled five times, and the stewardess turned pale. For a brief space, before they understood what had happened, the twins supposed she was going to be sick. But it wasn't that that was the matter with her, for after a moment's staring at nothing with horror on her face she pounced on them and pulled them bodily out of their berths, regardless by which end, and threw them on the floor anyhow. Then she plunged about and produced life-jackets; then she rushed down the passage flinging open the doors of the other cabins; then she whirled back again and tried to tie the twins into their life-jackets, but with hands that shook so that the strings immediately came undone again; and all the time she was calling out "Quick—quick—quick—" There was a great tramping of feet on deck and cries and shouting.

The curtains of the opposite berths yawned asunder and out came the Germans, astonishingly cured of their sea-sickness, and struggled vigorously into their life-jackets and then into fur coats, and had the fur coats instantly pulled off again by a very energetic steward who ran in and said fur coats in the water were death-traps,—a steward so much bent on saving people that he began to pull off the other things the German ladies had on as well, saying while he pulled, disregarding their protests, that in the water Mother Nature was the best. "Mother Nature—Mother Nature," said the steward, pulling; and he was only stopped just in the nick of time by the stewardess rushing in again and seeing what was happening to the helpless Germans.

Anna-Rose, even at that moment explanatory, pointed out to Anna-Felicitas, who had already grasped the fact, that no doubt there was a submarine somewhere about. The German ladies, seizing their valuables from beneath their pillows, in spite of the steward assuring them they wouldn't want them in the water, demanded to be taken up and somehow signalled to the submarine, which would never dare do anything to a ship containing its own flesh and blood—and an American ship, too—there must be some awful mistake—but anyhow they must be saved—there would be terrible trouble, that they could assure the steward and the twins and the scurrying passers-by down the passage, if America allowed two Germans to be destroyed—and anyhow they would insist on having their passage money refunded....

The German ladies departed down the passage, very incoherent and very unhappy but no longer sick, and Anna-Felicitas, clinging to the edge of her berth, feeling too miserable to mind about the submarine, feebly wondered, while the steward tied her properly into her life-jacket, at the cure effected in them. Anna-Rose seemed cured too, for she was buttoning a coat round Anna-Felicitas's shoulders, and generally seemed busy and brisk, ending by not even forgetting their precious little bag of money and tickets and passports, and fastening it round her neck in spite of the steward's assuring her that it would drag her down in the water like a stone tied to a kitten.

"You're a very cheerful man, aren't you," Anna-Rose said, as he pushed them out of the cabin and along the corridor, holding up Anna-Felicitas on her feet, who seemed quite unable to run alone.

The steward didn't answer, but caught hold of Anna-Felicitas at the foot of the stairs and carried her up them, and then having got her on deck propped her in a corner near the life-boat allotted to the set of cabins they were in, and darted away and in a minute was back again with a big coat which he wrapped round her.

"May as well be comfortable till you do begin to drown," he said briskly, "but mind you don't forget to throw it off, Missie, the minute you feel the water."

Anna-Felicitas slid down on to the deck, her head leaning against the wall, her eyes shut, a picture of complete indifference to whatever might be going to happen next. Her face was now as white as the frill of the night-gown that straggled out from beneath her coat, for the journey from the cabin to the deck had altogether finished her. Anna-Rose was thankful that she felt too ill to be afraid. Her own heart was black with despair,—despair that Anna-Felicitas, the dear and beautiful one, should presently, at any moment, be thrown into that awful heaving water, and certainly be hurt and frightened before she was choked out of life.

She sat down beside her, getting as close as possible to keep her warm. Her own twin. Her own beloved twin. She took her cold hands and put them away beneath the coat the steward had brought. She slid an arm round her and laid her cheek against her sleeve, so that she should know somebody was there, somebody who loved her. "What's the good of it all—why were we born—" she wondered, staring at the hideous gray waves as they swept up into sight over the side of the ship and away again as the ship rose up, and at the wet deck and the torn sky, and the miserable-looking passengers in their life-jackets collected together round the life-boat.

Nobody said anything except the German ladies. They, indeed, kept up a constant wail. The others were silent, the men mostly smoking cigarettes, the women holding their fluttering wraps about them, all of them staring out to sea, watching for the track of the torpedo to appear. One shot had been fired already and had missed. The ship was zig-zagging under every ounce of steam she could lay on. An official stood by the life-boat, which was ready with water in it and provisions. That the submarine must be mad, as the official remarked, to fire on an American ship, didn't console anybody, and his further assurance that the matter would not be allowed to rest there left them cold. They felt too sure that in all probability they themselves were going to rest there, down underneath that repulsive icy water, after a struggle that was going to be unpleasant.

The man who had roused Anna-Rose's indignation as the ship left the landing-stage by looking as though he were soon going to be sorry for her, came across from the first class, where his life-boat was, to watch for the track of the expected torpedo, and caught sight of the twins huddled in their corner.

Anna-Rose didn't see him, for she was staring with wide eyes out at the desolate welter of water and cloud, and thinking of home: the home that was, that used to be till such a little while ago, the home that now seemed to have been so amazingly, so unbelievably beautiful and blest, with its daily life of love and laughter and of easy confidence that to-morrow was going to be just as good. Happiness had been the ordinary condition there, a simple matter of course. Its place was taken now by courage. Anna-Rose felt sick at all this courage there was about. There should be no occasion for it. There should be no horrors to face, no cruelties to endure. Why couldn't brotherly love continue? Why must people get killing each other? She, for her part, would be behind nobody in courage and in the defying of a Fate that could behave, as she felt, so very unlike her idea of anything even remotely decent; but it oughtn't to be necessary, this constant condition of screwed-upness; it was waste of effort, waste of time, waste of life,—oh the stupidity of it all, she thought, rebellious and bewildered.

"Have some brandy," said the man, pouring out a little into a small cup.

Anna-Rose turned her eyes on him without moving the rest of her. She recognized him. He was going to be sorry for them again. He had much better be sorry for himself now, she thought, because he, just as much as they were, was bound for a watery bier.

"Thank you," she said distantly, for not only did she hate the smell of brandy but Aunt Alice had enjoined her with peculiar strictness on no account to talk to strange men, "I don't drink."

"Then I'll give the other one some," said the man.

"She too," said Anna-Rose, not changing her position but keeping a drearily watchful eye on him, "is a total abstainer."

"Well, I'll go and fetch some of your warm things for you. Tell me where your cabin is. You haven't got enough on."

"Thank you," said Anna-Rose distantly, "we have quite enough on, considering the occasion. We're dressed for drowning."

The man laughed, and said there would be no drowning, and that they had a splendid captain, and were outdistancing the submarine hand over fist. Anna-Rose didn't believe him, and suspected him of supposing her to be in need of cheering, but a gleam of comfort did in spite of herself steal into her heart.

He went away, and presently came back with a blanket and some pillows.

"If you will sit on the floor," he said, stuffing the pillows behind their backs, during which Anna-Felicitas didn't open her eyes, and her head hung about so limply that it looked as if it might at any moment roll off, "you may at least be as comfortable as you can."

Anna-Rose pointed out, while she helped him arrange Anna-Felicitas's indifferent head on the pillow, that she saw little use in being comfortable just a minute or two before drowning. "Drowning be hanged," said the man.

"That's how Uncle Arthur used to talk," said Anna-Rose, feeling suddenly quite at home, "except that he would have said 'Drowning be damned.'"

The man laughed. "Is he dead?" he asked, busy with Anna-Felicitas's head, which defied their united efforts to make it hold itself up.

"Dead?" echoed Anna-Rose, to whom the idea of Uncle Arthur's ever being anything so quiet as dead and not able to say any swear words for such a long time as eternity seemed very odd.

"You said he used to talk like that."

"Oh, no he's not dead at all. Quite the contrary."

The man laughed again, and having got Anna-Felicitas's head arranged in a position that at least, as Anna-Rose pointed out, had some sort of self-respect in it, he asked who they were with.

Anna-Rose looked at him with as much defiant independence as she could manage to somebody who was putting a pillow behind her back. He was going to be sorry for them. She saw it coming. He was going to say "You poor things," or words to that effect. That's what the people round Uncle Arthur's had said to them. That's what everybody had said to them since the war began, and Aunt Alice's friends had said it to her too, because she had to have her nieces live with her, and no doubt Uncle Arthur's friends who played golf with him had said it to him as well, except that probably they put in a damn so as to make it clearer for him and said "You poor damned thing," or something like that, and she was sick of the very words poor things. Poor things, indeed! "We're with each other," she said briefly, lifting her chin.

"Well, I don't think that's enough," said the man. "Not half enough. You ought to have a mother or something."

"Everybody can't have mothers," said Anna-Rose very defiantly indeed, tears rushing into her eyes.

The man tucked the blanket round their resistless legs. "There now," he said. "That's better. What's the good of catching your deaths?"

Anna-Rose, glad that he hadn't gone on about mothers, said that with so much death imminent, catching any of it no longer seemed to her particularly to matter, and the man laughed and pulled over a chair and sat down beside her.

She didn't know what he saw anywhere in that dreadful situation to laugh at, but just the sound of a laugh was extraordinarily comforting. It made one feel quite different. Wholesome again. Like waking up to sunshine and one's morning bath and breakfast after a nightmare. He seemed altogether a very comforting man. She liked him to sit near them. She hoped he was a good man. Aunt Alice had said there were very few good men, hardly any in fact except one's husband, but this one did seem one of the few exceptions. And she thought that by now, he having brought them all those pillows, he could no longer come under the heading of strange men. When he wasn't looking she put out her hand secretly and touched his coat where he wouldn't feel it. It comforted her to touch his coat. She hoped Aunt Alice wouldn't have disapproved of seeing her sitting side by side with him and liking it.

Aunt Alice had been, as her custom was, vague, when Anna-Rose, having given her the desired promise not to talk or let Anna-Felicitas talk to strange men, and desiring to collect any available information for her guidance in her new responsible position had asked, "But when are men not strange?"

"When you've married them," said Aunt Alice. "After that, of course, you love them."

And she sighed heavily, for it was bed-time.

---

CHAPTER VI

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.

As the day went on, and the St. Luke left off zig-zagging, the relief of those on board was the relief of a reprieve from death. Almost everybody was cured of sea-sickness, and quite everybody was ready to overwhelm his neighbour with cordiality and benevolence. Rich people didn't mind poor people, and came along from the first class and talked to them just as if they had been the same flesh and blood as themselves. A billionairess native to Chicago, who had crossed the Atlantic forty times without speaking to a soul, an achievement she was as justly proud of as an artist is of his best creations, actually asked somebody in a dingy mackintosh, whose little boy still looked pale, if he had been frightened; and an exclusive young man from Boston talked quite a long while to an English lady without first having made sure that she was well-connected. What could have been more like heaven? The tone on the St. Luke that day was very like what the tone in the kingdom of heaven must be in its simple politeness. "And so you see," said Anna-Rose, who was fond of philosophizing in season and out of season, and particularly out of season, "how good comes out of evil."

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.

The twins, as a result of the submarine's activities, were having the pleasantest day they had had for months. It was the realization of this that caused Anna-Rose's remark about good coming out of evil. The background, she could not but perceive, was a very odd one for their pleasantest day for months—a rolling steamer and a cold wind flicking at them round the corner; but backgrounds, she pointed out to Anna-Felicitas, who smiled her agreement broadly and instantly, are negligible things: it is what goes on in front of them that matters. Of what earthly use, for instance, had been those splendid summer afternoons in the perfect woods and gardens that so beautifully framed in Uncle Arthur?

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.

Anna-Rose left off talking, and became lost in memories. For a long time, she remembered, she had told herself it was her mother's death blotting the light out of life, but one day Anna-Felicitas said aloud that it was Uncle Arthur, and Anna-Rose knew it was true. Their mother's death was something so tender, so beautiful, that terrible as it was to them to be left without her they yet felt raised up by it somehow, raised on to a higher level than where they had been before, closer in their hearts to real things, to real values. But Uncle Arthur came into possession of their lives as a consequence of that death, and he had towered up between them and every glimpse of the sun. Suddenly there was no such thing as freedom and laughter. Suddenly everything one said and did was wrong. "And you needn't think," Anna-Felicitas had said wisely, "that he's like that because we're Germans—or seem to be Germans," she amended. "It's because he's Uncle Arthur. Look at Aunt Alice. She's not a German. And yet look at her."

And Anna-Rose had looked at Aunt Alice, though only in her mind's eye, for at that moment the twins were three miles away in a wood picnicking, and Aunt Alice was at home recovering from a tête-à-tête luncheon with Uncle Arthur who hadn't said a word from start to finish; and though she didn't like most of his words when he did say them, she liked them still less when he didn't say them, for then she imagined them, and what she imagined was simply awful,—Anna-Rose had, I say, looked at Aunt Alice in her mind's eye, and knew that this too was true.

Mr. Twist reappeared, followed by the brisk steward with a tray of tea and cake, and their corner became very like a cheerful picnic.

Mr. Twist was most pleasant and polite. Anna-Rose had told him quite soon after he began to talk to her, in order, as she said, to clear his mind of misconceptions, that she and Anna-Felicitas, though their clothes at that moment, and the pigtails in which their flair was done, might be misleading, were no longer children, but quite the contrary; that they were, in fact, persons who were almost ripe for going to dances, and certainly in another year would be perfectly ripe for dances supposing there were any.

Mr. Twist listened attentively, and begged her to tell him any other little thing she might think of as useful to him in his capacity of friend and attendant,—both of which, said Mr. Twist, he intended to be till he had seen them safely landed in New York.

"I hope you don't think we need anybody," said Anna-Rose. "We shall like being friends with you very much, but only on terms of perfect equality."

"Sure," said Mr. Twist, who was an American.

"I thought—"

She hesitated a moment.

"You thought?" encouraged Mr. Twist politely.

"I thought at Liverpool you looked as if you were being sorry for us."

"Sorry?" said Mr. Twist, in the tone of one who repudiates.

"Yes. When we were waving good-bye to—to our friends."

"Sorry?" repeated Mr. Twist.

"Which was great waste of your time."

"I should think so," said Mr. Twist with heartiness.

Anna-Rose, having cleared the ground of misunderstandings, an activity in which at all times she took pleasure, accepted Mr. Twist's attentions in the spirit in which they were offered, which was, as he said, one of mutual friendliness and esteem. As he was never sea-sick, he could move about and do things for them that might be difficult to do for themselves; as he knew a great deal about stewardesses, he could tell them what sort of tip theirs expected; as he was American, he could illuminate them about that country. He had been doing Red Cross work with an American ambulance in France for ten months, and was going home for a short visit to see how his mother, who, Anna-Rose gathered, was ancient and widowed, was getting on. His mother, he said, lived in seclusion in a New England village with his sister, who had not married.

"Then she's got it all before her," said Anna-Rose.

"Like us," said Anna-Felicitas.

"I shouldn't think she'd got as much of it before her as you," said Mr. Twist, "because she's considerably more grown up—I mean," he added hastily, as Anna-Rose's mouth opened, "she's less—well, less completely young."

"We're not completely young," said Anna-Rose with dignity. "People are completely young the day they're born, and ever after that they spend their time becoming less so."

"Exactly. And my sister has been becoming less so longer than you have. I assure you that's all I meant. She's less so even than I am."

"Then," said Anna-Rose, glancing at that part of Mr. Twist's head where it appeared to be coming through his hair, "she must have got to the stage when one is called a maiden lady."

"And if she were a German," said Anna-Felicitas suddenly, who hadn't till then said anything to Mr. Twist but only smiled widely at him whenever he happened to look her way, "she wouldn't be either a lady or a maiden, but just an It. It's very rude of Germans, I think," went on Anna-Felicitas, abstractedly smiling at the cake Mr. Twist was offering her, "never to let us be anything but Its till we've taken on some men."

Mr. Twist expressed surprise at this way of describing marriage, and inquired of Anna-Felicitas what she knew about Germans.

"The moment you leave off being sea-sick, Anna-F.," said Anna-Rose, turning to her severely, "you start being indiscreet. Well, I suppose," she added with a sigh to Mr. Twist, "you'd have had to know sooner or later. Our name is Twinkler."

She watched him to see the effect of this, and Mr. Twist, perceiving he was expected to say something, said that he didn't mind that anyhow, and that he could bear something worse in the way of revelations.

"Does it convey nothing to you?" asked Anna-Rose, astonished, for in Germany the name of Twinkler was a mighty name, and even in England it was well known.

Mr. Twist shook his head. "Only that it sounds cheerful," he said.

Anna-Rose watched his face. "It isn't only Twinkler," she said, speaking very distinctly. "It's von Twinkler."

"That's German," said Mr. Twist; but his face remained serene.

"Yes. And so are we. That is, we would be if it didn't happen that we weren't."

"I don't think I quite follow," said Mr. Twist.

"It is very difficult," agreed Anna-Rose. "You see, we used to have a German father."

"But only because our mother married him," explained Anna-Felicitas. "Else we wouldn't have."

"And though she only did it once," said Anna-Rose, "ages ago, it has dogged our footsteps ever since."

"It's very surprising," mused Anna-Felicitas, "what marrying anybody does. You go into a church, and before you know where you are, you're all tangled up with posterity."

"And much worse than that," said Anna-Rose, staring wide-eyed at her own past experiences, "posterity's all tangled up with you. It's really simply awful sometimes for posterity. Look at us."

"If there hadn't been a war we'd have been all right," said Anna-Felicitas. "But directly there's a war, whoever it is you've married, if it isn't one of your own countrymen, rises up against you, just as if he were too many meringues you'd had for dinner."

"Living or dead," said Anna-Rose, nodding, "he rises up against you."

"Till the war we never thought at all about it," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Either one way or the other," said Anna-Rose.

"We never used to bother about what we were," said Anna-Felicitas. "We were just human beings, and so was everybody else just human beings."

"We didn't mind a bit about being Germans, or about other people not being Germans."

"But you mustn't think we mind now either," said Anna-Felicitas, "because, you see, we're not."

Mr. Twist looked at them in turn. His ears were a little prominent and pointed, and they gave him rather the air, when he put his head on one side and looked at them, of an attentive fox-terrier. "I don't think I quite follow," he said again.

"It is very difficult," agreed Anna-Rose.

"It's because you've got into your head that we're German because of our father," said Anna-Felicitas. "But what's a father, when all's said and done?"

"Well," said Mr. Twist, "one has to have him."

"But having got him he isn't anything like as important as a mother," said Anna-Rose.

"One hardly sees one's father," said Anna-Felicitas. "He's always busy. He's always thinking of something else."

"Except when he looks at one and tells one to sit up straight," said Anna-Rose pointedly to Anna-Felicitas, whose habit of drooping still persisted in spite of her father's admonishments.

"Of course he's very kind and benevolent when he happens to remember that one is there," said Anna-Felicitas, sitting up beautifully for a moment, "but that's about everything."

"And of course," said Anna-Rose, "one's father's intentions are perfectly sound and good, but his attention seems to wander. Whereas one's mother—"

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas, "one's mother—"

They broke off and looked straight in front of them. It didn't bear speaking of. It didn't bear thinking of.

Suddenly Anna-Felicitas, weak from excessive sea-sickness, began to cry. The tears just slopped over as though no resistance of any sort were possible.

Anna-Rose stared at her a moment horror-struck. "Look here, Anna-F.," she exclaimed, wrath in her voice, "I won't have you be sentimental—I won't have you be sentimental...."

And then she too began to cry.

Well, once having hopelessly disgraced and exposed themselves, there was nothing for it but to take Mr. Twist into their uttermost confidence. It was dreadful. It was awful. Before that strange man. A person they hardly knew. Other strangers passing. Exposing their feelings. Showing their innermost miserable places.

They writhed and struggled in their efforts to stop, to pretend they weren't crying, that it was really nothing but just tears,—odd ones left over from last time, which was years and years ago,—"But really years and years ago," sobbed Anna-Rose, anxiously explaining,—"the years one falls down on garden paths in, and cuts one's knees, and one's mother—one's mother—c-c-c-comforts one—"

"See here," said Mr. Twist, interrupting these incoherences, and pulling out a beautiful clean pocket-handkerchief which hadn't even been unfolded yet, "you've got to tell me all about it right away."

And he shook out the handkerchief, and with the first-aid promptness his Red Cross experience had taught him, started competently wiping up their faces.

---

CHAPTER VII

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.

"And as long as one is as kind as Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose; but secretly she thought that having been begun so successfully at his feet, and carried upwards with such grace of long limbs and happy proportions, he might as well have gone on equally felicitously for the last little bit.

"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.

Those were the days in mid-Atlantic when England was lost in its own peculiar mists, and the sunshine of America was stretching out towards them. The sea was getting calmer and bluer every hour, and submarines more and more unlikely. If a ship could be pleasant, which Anna-Felicitas doubted, for she still found difficulty in dressing and undressing without being sea-sick and was unpopular in the cabin, this ship was pleasant. You lay in a deck-chair all day long, staring at the blue sky and blue sea that enclosed you as if you were living in the middle of a jewel, and tried not to remember—oh, there were heaps of things it was best not to remember; and when the rail of the ship moved up across the horizon too far into the sky, or moved down across it and showed too much water, you just shut your eyes and then it didn't matter; and the sun shone warm and steady on your face, and the wind tickled the tassel on the top of your German-knitted cap, and Mr. Twist came and read aloud to you, which sent you to sleep quicker than anything you had ever known.

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.

Anna-Felicitas, who considered that, if these things were short-cuts to anywhere, seeing she knew them all by heart she must have long ago got there, snoozed complacently. Sometimes for a few moments she would drop off really to sleep, and then her mouth would fall open, which worried Anna-Rose, who couldn't bear her to look even for a moment less beautiful than she knew she was, so that she fidgeted more than ever, unable, pinned down by politeness and the culture being administered, to make her shut her mouth and look beautiful again by taking and shaking her. Also Anna-Felicitas had a trick of waking up suddenly and forgetting to be polite, as one does when first one wakes up and hasn't had time to remember one is a lady. "To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures noo," Mr. Twist would finish, for instance, with a sort of gulp of satisfaction at having swallowed yet another solid slab of culture; and Anna-Felicitas, returning suddenly to consciousness, would murmur, with her eyes still shut and her head lolling limply, things like, "After all, it does rhyme with blue. I wonder why, then, one still doesn't like it."

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.

Usually Anna-Felicitas didn't contradict Anna-Rose, being too sleepy or too lazy, but sometimes she did, and then Anna-Rose got angry, and would get what the Germans call a red head and look at Anna-Felicitas very severely and say things, and Mr. Twist would close his book and watch with that alert, cocked-up-ear look of a sympathetic and highly interested terrier; but sooner or later the ship would always give a roll, and Anna-Felicitas would shut her eyes and fade to paleness and become the helpless bundle of sickness that nobody could possibly go on being severe with.

The passengers in the second class were more generally friendly than those in the first class. The first class sorted itself out into little groups, and whispered about each other, as Anna-Rose observed, watching their movements across the rope that separated her from them. The second class remained to the end one big group, frayed out just a little at the edge in one or two places.

The chief fraying out was where the Twinkler kids, as the second-class young men, who knew no better, dared to call them, interrupted the circle by talking apart with Mr. Twist. Mr. Twist had no business there. He was a plutocrat of the first class; but in spite of the regulations which cut off the classes from communicating, with a view apparently to the continued sanitariness of the first class, the implication being that the second class was easily infectious and probably overrun, there he was every day and several times in every day. He must have heavily squared the officials, the second-class young men thought until the day when Mr. Twist let it somehow be understood that he had known the Twinkler young ladies for years, dandled them in their not very remote infancy on his already full-grown knee, and had been specially appointed to look after them on this journey.

Mr. Twist did not specify who had appointed him, except to the Twinkler young ladies themselves, and to them he announced that it was no less a thing, being, or creature, than Providence. The second-class young men, therefore, in spite of their rising spirits as danger lay further behind, and their increasing tendency, peculiar to those who go on ships, to become affectionate, found themselves no further on in acquaintance with the Misses Twinkler the last day of the voyage than they had been the first. Not that, under any other conditions, they would have so much as noticed the existence of the Twinkler kids. In their blue caps, pulled down tight to their eyebrows and hiding every trace of hair, they looked like bald babies. They never came to meals; their assiduous guardian, or whatever he was, feeding them on deck with the care of a mother-bird for its fledglings, so that nobody except the two German ladies in their cabin had seen them without the caps. The young men put them down as half-grown only, somewhere about fourteen they thought, and nothing but what, if they were boys instead of girls, would have been called louts.

Still, a ship is a ship, and it is wonderful what can be managed in the way of dalliance if one is shut up on one long enough; and the Misses Twinkler, in spite of their loutishness, their apparent baldness, and their constant round-eyed solemnity, would no doubt have been the objects of advances before New York was reached if it hadn't been for Mr. Twist. There wasn't a girl under forty in the second class on that voyage, the young men resentfully pointed out to each other, except these two kids who were too much under it, and a young lady of thirty who sat manicuring her nails most of the day with her back supported by a life-boat, and polishing them with red stuff till they flashed rosily in the sun. This young lady was avoided for the first two days, while the young men still remembered their mothers, because of what she looked like; but was greatly loved for the rest of the voyage precisely for that reason.

Still, every one couldn't get near her. She was only one; and there were at least a dozen active, cooped-up young men taking lithe, imprisoned exercise in long, swift steps up and down the deck, ready for any sort of enterprise, bursting with energy and sea-air and spirits. So that at last the left-overs, those of the young men the lady of the rosy nails was less kind to, actually in their despair attempted ghastly flirtations with the two German ladies. They approached them with a kind of angry amorousness. They tucked them up roughly in rugs. They brought them cushions as though they were curses. And it was through this rapprochement, in the icy warmth of which the German ladies expanded like bulky flowers and grew at least ten years younger, the ten years they shed being their most respectable ones, that the ship became aware of the nationality of the Misses Twinkler.

The German ladies were not really German, as they explained directly there were no more submarines about, for a good woman, they said, becomes automatically merged into her husband, and they, therefore, were merged into Americans, both of them, and as loyal as you could find, but the Twinklers were the real thing, they said,—real, unadulterated, arrogant Junkers, which is why they wouldn't talk to anybody; for no Junker, said the German ladies, thinks anybody good enough to be talked to except another Junker. The German ladies themselves had by sheer luck not been born Junkers. They had missed it very narrowly, but they had missed it, for which they were very thankful seeing what believers they were, under the affectionate manipulation of their husbands, in democracy; but they came from the part of Germany where Junkers most abound, and knew the sort of thing well.

It seemed to Mr. Twist, who caught scraps of conversation as he came and went, that in the cabin the Twinklers must have alienated sympathy. They had. They had done more; they had got themselves actively disliked.

From the first moment when Anna-Rose had dared to peep into their shrouded bunks the ladies had been prejudiced, and this prejudice had later flared up into a great and justified dislike. The ladies, to begin with, hadn't known that they were von Twinklers, but had supposed them mere Twinklers, and the von, as every German knows, makes all the difference, especially in the case of Twinklers, who, without it, were a race, the ladies knew, of small shopkeepers, laundresses and postmen in the Westphalian district, but with it were one of the oldest families in Prussia; known to all Germans; possessed of a name ensuring subservience wherever it went.

In this stage of preliminary ignorance the ladies had treated the two apparently ordinary Twinklers with the severity their conduct, age, and obvious want of means deserved; and when, goaded by their questionings, the smaller and more active Twinkler had let out her von at them much as one lets loose a dog when one is alone and weak against the attacks of an enemy, instead of falling in harmoniously with the natural change of attitude of the ladies, which became immediately perfectly polite and conciliatory, as well as motherly in its interest and curiosity, the two young Junkers went dumb. They would have nothing to do with the most motherly questioning. And just in proportion as the German ladies found themselves full of eager milk of kindness, only asking to be permitted to nourish, so did they find themselves subsequently, after a day or two of such uncloaked repugnance to it, left with quantities of it useless on their hands and all going sour.

From first to last the Twinklers annoyed them. As plain Twinklers they had been tiresome in a hundred ways in the cabin, and as von Twinklers they were intolerable in their high-nosed indifference.

It had naturally been expected by the elder ladies at the beginning of the journey, that two obscure Twinklers of such manifest youth should rise politely and considerately each morning very early, and get themselves dressed and out of the way in at the most ten minutes, leaving the cabin clear for the slow and careful putting together bit by bit of that which ultimately emerged a perfect specimen of a lady of riper years, but the weedy Twinkler insisted on lying in her berth so late that if the ladies wished to be in time for the best parts of breakfast, which they naturally and passionately did wish, they were forced to dress in her presence, which was most annoying and awkward.

It is true she lay with closed eyes, apparently apathetic, but you never know with persons of that age. Experience teaches not to trust them. They shut their eyes, and yet seem, later on, to have seen; they apparently sleep, and afterwards are heard asking their spectacled American friend what people do on a ship, a place of so much gustiness, if their hair gets blown off into the sea. Also the weedy one had a most tiresome trick of being sick instantly every time Odol was used, or a little brandy was drunk. Odol is most refreshing; it has a lovely smell, without which no German bedroom is complete. And the brandy was not common schnaps, but an old expensive brandy that, regarded as a smell, was a credit to anybody's cabin.

The German ladies would have persisted, and indeed did persist in using Odol and drinking a little brandy, indifferent to the feeble prayer from the upper berth which floated down entreating them not to, but in their own interests they were forced to give it up. The objectionable child did not pray a second time; she passed immediately from prayer to performance. Of two disagreeables wise women choose the lesser, but they remain resentful.

The other Twinkler, the small active one, did get up early and take herself off, but she frequently mixed up her own articles of toilet with those belonging to the ladies, and would pin up her hair, preparatory to washing her face, with their hairpins.

When they discovered this they hid them, and she, not finding any, having come to the end of her own, lost no time in irresolution but picked up their nail-scissors and pinned up her pigtails with that.

It was a particularly sacred pair of nail-scissors that almost everything blunted. To use them for anything but nails was an outrage, but the grossest outrage was to touch them at all. When they told her sharply that the scissors were very delicate and she was instantly to take them out of her hair, she tugged them out in a silence that was itself impertinent, and pinned up her pigtails with their buttonhook instead.

Then they raised themselves on their elbows in their berths and asked her what sort of a bringing up she could have had, and they raised their voices as well, for though they were grateful, as they later on declared, for not having been born Junkers, they had nevertheless acquired by practice in imitation some of the more salient Junker characteristics.

"You are salop," said the upper berth lady,—which is untranslatable, not on grounds of propriety but of idiom. It is not, however, a term of praise.

"Yes, that is what you are—salop," echoed the lower berth lady. "And your sister is salop too—lying in bed till all hours."

"It is shameful for girls to be salop," said the upper berth.

"I didn't know it was your buttonhook. I thought it was ours," said Anna-Rose, pulling this out too with vehemence.

"That is because you are salop," said the lower berth.

"And I didn't know it wasn't our scissors either."

"Salop, salop," said the lower berth, beating her hand on the wooden edge of her bunk.

"And—and I'm sorry."

Anna-Rose's face was very red. She didn't look sorry, she looked angry. And so she was; but it was with herself, for having failed in discernment and grown-upness. She ought to have noticed that the scissors and buttonhook were not hers. She had pounced on them with the ill-considered haste of twelve years old. She hadn't been a lady,—she whose business it was to be an example and mainstay to Anna-Felicitas, in all things going first, showing her the way.

She picked up the sponge and plunged it into the water, and was just going to plunge her annoyed and heated face in after it when the upper berth lady said: "Your mother should be ashamed of herself to have brought you up so badly."

"And send you off like this before she has taught you even the ABC of manners," said the lower berth.

"Evidently," said the upper berth, "she can have none herself."

"Evidently," said the lower berth, "she is herself salop."

The sponge, dripping with water, came quickly out of the basin in Anna-Rose's clenched fist. For one awful instant she stood there in her nightgown, like some bird of judgment poised for dreadful flight, her eyes flaming, her knotted pigtails bristling on the top of her head.

The wet sponge twitched in her hand. The ladies did not realize the significance of that twitching, and continued to offer large angry faces as a target. One of the faces would certainly have received the sponge and Anna-Rose have been disgraced for ever, if it hadn't been for the prompt and skilful intervention of Anna-Felicitas.

For Anna-Felicitas, roused from her morning languor by the unusual loudness of the German ladies' voices, and smitten into attention and opening of her eyes, heard the awful things they were saying and saw the sponge. Instantly she knew, seeing it was Anna-Rose who held it, where it would be in another second, and hastily putting out a shaking little hand from her top berth, caught hold feebly but obstinately of the upright ends of Anna-Rose's knotted pigtails.

"I'm going to be sick," she announced with great presence of mind and entire absence of candour.

She knew, however, that she only had to sit up in order to be sick, and the excellent child—das gute Kind, as her father used to call her because she, so conveniently from the parental point of view, invariably never wanted to be or do anything particularly—without hesitation sacrificed herself in order to save her sister's honour, and sat up and immediately was.

By the time Anna-Rose had done attending to her, all fury had died out. She never could see Anna Felicitas lying back pale and exhausted after one of these attacks without forgiving her and everybody else everything.

She climbed up on the wooden steps to smoothe her pillow and tuck her blanket round her, and when Anna-Felicitas, her eyes shut, murmured, "Christopher—don't mind them—" and she suddenly realized, for they never called each other by those names except in great moments of emotion when it was necessary to cheer and encourage, what Anna-Felicitas had saved her from, and that it had been done deliberately, she could only whisper back, because she was so afraid of crying, "No, no, Columbus dear—of course—who really cares about them—" and came down off the steps with no fight left in her.

Also the wrath of the ladies was considerably assuaged. They had retreated behind their curtains until the so terribly unsettled Twinkler should be quiet again, and when once more they drew them a crack apart in order to keep an eye on what the other one might be going to do next and saw her doing nothing except, with meekness, getting dressed, they merely inquired what part of Westphalia she came from, and only in the tone they asked it did they convey that whatever part it was, it was anyhow a contemptible one.

"We don't come from Westphalia," said Anna-Rose, bristling a little, in spite of herself, at their persistent baiting.

Anna-Felicitas listened in cold anxiousness. She didn't want to have to be sick again. She doubted whether she could bear it.

"You must come from somewhere," said the lower berth, "and being a Twinkler it must be Westphalia."

"We don't really," said Anna-Rose, mindful of Anna-Felicitas's words and making a great effort to speak politely. "We come from England."

"England!" cried the lower berth, annoyed by this quibbling. "You were born in Westphalia. All Twinklers are born in Westphalia."

"Invariably they are," said the upper berth. "The only circumstance that stops them is if their mothers happen to be temporarily absent."

"But we weren't, really," said Anna-Rose, continuing her efforts to remain bland.

"Are you pretending—pretending to us," said the lower berth lady, again beating her hand on the edge of her bunk, "that you are not German?"

"Our father was German," said Anna-Rose, driven into a corner, "but I don't suppose he is now. I shouldn't think he'd want to go on being one directly he got to a really neutral place."

"Has he fled his country?" inquired the lower berth sternly, scenting what she had from the first suspected, something sinister in the Twinkler background.

"I suppose one might call it that," said Anna-Rose after a pause of consideration, tying her shoe-laces.

"Do you mean to say," said the ladies with one voice, feeling themselves now on the very edge of a scandal, "he was forced to fly from Westphalia?"

"I suppose one might put it that way," said Anna-Rose, again considering.

She took her cap off its hook and adjusted it over her hair with a deliberation intended to assure Anna-Felicitas that she was remaining calm. "Except that it wasn't from Westphalia he flew, but Prussia," she said.

"Prussia?" cried the ladies as one woman, again rising themselves on their elbows.

"That's where our father lived," said Anna-Rose, staring at them in her surprise at their surprise. "So of course, as he lived there, when he died he did that there too."

"Prussia?" cried the ladies again. "He died? You said your father fled his country."

"No. You said that," said Anna-Rose.

She gave her cap a final tug down over her ears and turned to the door. She felt as if she quite soon again in spite of Anna-Felicitas, might not be able to be a lady.

"After all, it is what you do when you go to heaven," she said as she opened the door, unable to resist, according to her custom, having the last word.

"But Prussia?" they still cried, still button-holing her, as it were, from afar. "Then—you were born in Prussia?"

"Yes, but we couldn't help it," said Anna-Rose; and shut the door quickly behind her.

---

CHAPTER VIII

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 ...

He cogitated much in his cabin—one with a private bathroom, for Mr. Twist had what Aunt Alice called ample means—on these two defenceless children. If they had been Belgians now, or Serbians, or any persons plainly in need of relief! As it was, America would be likely, he feared, to consider that either Germany or England ought to be looking after them, and might conceivably remain chilly and uninterested.

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.

All Mr. Twist's chivalry, of which there was a great deal, rose up within him at the thought of Uncle Arthur. He wanted to go and ask him what he meant by such conduct, and earnestly inquire of him whether he called himself a man; but as he knew he couldn't do this, being on a ship heading for New York, he made up for it by taking as much care of the ejected nieces as if he were an uncle himself,—but the right sort of uncle, the sort you have in America, the sort that regards you as a sacred and precious charge.

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."

"I suppose that's why it's called middle-aged," said Anna-Felicitas dreamily. "One middle-ages first, and from there it just spreads. It must be queer," she added pensively, "to watch oneself gradually rotting."

These were the sorts of observations, Mr. Twist felt, that might prejudice his mother against the twins If they could be induced not to say most of the things they did say when in her presence, he felt that his house, of all houses in America, should be offered them as a refuge whenever they were in need of one. But his mother was not, he feared, very adaptable. In her house—it was legally his, but it never felt as if it were—people adapted themselves to her. He doubted whether the twins could or would. Their leading characteristic, he had observed, was candour. They had no savoir faire. They seemed incapable of anything but naturalness, and their particular type of naturalness was not one, he was afraid, that his mother would understand.

She had not been out of her New England village, a place called briefly, with American economy of time, Clark, for many years, and her ideal of youthful femininity was still that which she had been herself. She had, if unconsciously, tried to mould Mr. Twist also on these lines, in spite of his being a boy, and owing to his extreme considerateness had not yet discovered her want of success. For years, indeed, she had been completely successful, and Mr. Twist arrived at and embarked on adolescence with the manners and ways of thinking of a perfect lady.

Till he was nineteen he was educated at home, as it were at his mother's knee, at any rate within reach of that sacred limb, and she had taught him to reverence women; the reason given, or rather conveyed, being that he had had and still was having a mother. Which he was never to forget. In hours of temptation. In hours of danger. Mr. Twist, with his virginal white mind, used to wonder when the hours of temptation and of danger would begin, and rather wish, in the elegant leisure of his half-holidays, that they soon would so that he might show how determined he was to avoid them.

For the ten years from his father's death till he went to Harvard, he lived with his mother and sister and was their assiduous attendant. His mother took the loss of his father badly. She didn't get over it, as widows sometimes do, and grow suddenly ten years younger. The sight of her, so black and broken, of so daily recurring a patience, of such frequent deliberate brightening for the sake of her children, kept Mr. Twist, as he grew up, from those thoughts which sometimes occur to young men and have to do with curves and dimples. He was too much absorbed by his mother to think on such lines. He was flooded with reverence and pity. Through her, all women were holy to him. They were all mothers, either actual or to be—after, of course, the proper ceremonies. They were all people for whom one leapt up and opened doors, placed chairs out of draughts, and fetched black shawls. On warm spring days, when he was about eighteen, he told himself earnestly that it would be a profanity, a terrible secret sinning, to think amorously—yes, he supposed the word was amorously—while there under his eyes, pervading his days from breakfast to bedtime, was that mourning womanhood, that lopped life, that example of brave doing without any hope or expectation except what might be expected or hoped from heaven. His mother was wonderful the way she bore things. There she was, with nothing left to look forward to in the way of pleasures except the resurrection, yet she did not complain.

But after he had been at Harvard a year a change came over Mr. Twist. Not that he did not remain dutiful and affectionate, but he perceived that it was possible to peep round the corners of his mother, the rock-like corners that had so long jutted out between him and the view, and on the other side there seemed to be quite a lot of interesting things going on. He continued, however, only to eye most of them from afar, and the nearest he got to temptation while at Harvard was to read "Madame Bovary."

After Harvard he was put into an engineering firm, for the Twists only had what would in English money be five thousand pounds a year, and belonged therefore, taking dollars as the measure of standing instead of birth, to the middle classes. Aunt Alice would have described such an income as ample means; Mrs. Twist called it straitened circumstances, and lived accordingly in a condition of perpetual self-sacrifice and doings without. She had a car, but it was only a car, not a Pierce-Arrow; and there was a bathroom to every bedroom, but there were only six bedrooms; and the house stood on a hill and looked over the most beautiful woods, but they were somebody else's woods. She felt, as she beheld the lives of those of her neighbours she let her eyes rest on, who were the millionaires dotted round about the charming environs of Clark, that she was indeed a typical widow,—remote, unfriended, melancholy, poor.

Mrs. Twist might feel poor, but she was certainly comfortable. It was her daughter Edith's aim in life to secure for her the comfort and leisure necessary for any grief that wishes to be thorough. The house was run beautifully by Edith. There were three servants, of whom Edith was one. She was the lady's maid, the head cook, and the family butler. And Mr. Twist, till he went to Harvard, might be described as the page-boy, and afterwards in his vacations as the odd man about the house. Everything centred round their mother. She made a good deal of work, because of being so anxious not to give trouble. She wouldn't get out of the way of evil, but bleakly accepted it. She wouldn't get out of a draught, but sat in it till one or other of her children remembered they hadn't shut the door. When the inevitable cold was upon her and she was lamentably coughing, she would mention the door for the first time, and quietly say she hadn't liked to trouble them to shut it, they had seemed so busy with their own affairs.

But after he had been in the engineering firm a little while, a further change came over Mr. Twist. He was there to make money, more money, for his mother. The first duty of an American male had descended on him. He wished earnestly to fulfil it creditably, in spite of his own tastes being so simple that his income of £5000—it was his, not his mother's, but it didn't feel as if it were—would have been more than sufficient for him. Out of engineering, then, was he to wrest all the things that might comfort his mother. He embarked on his career with as determined an expression on his mouth as so soft and friendly a mouth could be made to take, and he hadn't been in it long before he passed out altogether beyond the line of thinking his mother had laid down for him, and definitely grew up.

The office was in New York, far enough away from Clark for him to be at home only for the Sundays. His mother put him to board with her brother Charles, a clergyman, the rector of the Church of Angelic Refreshment at the back of Tenth Street, and the teapot out of which Uncle Charles poured his tea at his hurried and uncomfortable meals—for he practised the austerities and had no wife—dribbled at its spout. Hold it as carefully as one might it dribbled at its spout, and added to the confused appearance of the table by staining the cloth afresh every time it was used.

Mr. Twist, who below the nose was nothing but kindliness and generosity, his slightly weak chin, his lavishly-lipped mouth, being all amiability and affection, above the nose was quite different. In the middle came his nose, a nose that led him to improve himself, to read and meditate the poets, to be tenacious in following after the noble; and above were eyes in which simplicity sat side by side with appreciation; and above these was the forehead like a dome; and behind this forehead were inventions.

He had not been definitely aware that he was inventive till he came into daily contact with Uncle Charles's teapot. In his boyhood he had often fixed up little things for Edith,—she was three years older than he, and was even then canning and preserving and ironing,—little simplifications and alleviations of her labour; but they had been just toys, things that had amused him to put together and that he forgot as soon as they were done. But the teapot revealed to him clearly what his forehead was there for. He would not and could not continue, being the soul of considerateness, to spill tea on Uncle Charles's table-cloth at every meal—they had tea at breakfast, and at luncheon, and at supper—and if he were thirsty he spilled it several times at every meal. For a long time he coaxed the teapot. He was thoughtful with it. He handled it with the most delicate precision. He gave it time. He never hurried it. He never filled it more than half full. And yet at the end of every pouring, out came the same devastating dribble on to the cloth.

Then he went out and bought another teapot, one of a different pattern, with a curved spout instead of a straight one.

The same thing happened.

Then he went to Wanamaker's, and spent an hour in the teapot section trying one pattern after the other, patiently pouring water, provided by a tipped but languid and supercilious assistant, out of each different make of teapot into cups.

They all dribbled.

Then Mr. Twist went home and sat down and thought. He thought and thought, with his dome-like forehead resting on his long thin hand; and what came out of his forehead at last, sprang out of it as complete in every detail as Pallas Athene when she very similarly sprang, was that now well-known object on every breakfast table, Twist's Non-Trickler Teapot.

In five years Mr. Twist made a fortune out of the teapot. His mother passed from her straitened circumstances to what she still would only call a modest competence, but what in England would have been regarded as wallowing in money. She left off being middle-class, and was received into the lower upper-class, the upper part of this upper-class being reserved for great names like Astor, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. With these Mrs. Twist could not compete. She would no doubt some day, for Edward was only thirty and there were still coffee-pots; but what he was able to add to the family income helped her for a time to bear the loss of the elder Twist with less of bleakness in her resignation. It was as though an east wind veered round for a brief space a little to the south.

Being naturally, however, inclined to deprecation, when every other reason for it was finally removed by her assiduous son she once more sought out and firmly laid hold of the departed Twist, and hung her cherished unhappiness up on him again as if he were a peg. When the novelty of having a great many bedrooms instead of six, and a great deal of food not to eat but to throw away, and ten times of everything else instead of only once, began to wear off, Mrs. Twist drooped again, and pulled the departed Twist out of the decent forgetfulness of the past, and he once more came to dinner in the form of his favourite dishes, and assisted in the family conversations by means of copious quotations from his alleged utterances.

Mr. Twist's income was anything between sixty and seventy thousand pounds a year by the time the war broke out. Having invented and patented the simple device that kept the table-cloths of America, and indeed of Europe, spotless, all he had to do was to receive his percentages; sit still, in fact, and grow richer. But so much had he changed since his adolescence that he preferred to stick to his engineering and his office in New York rather than go home and be happy with his mother.

She could not understand this behaviour in Edward. She understood his behaviour still less when he went off to France in 1915, himself equipping and giving the ambulance he drove.

For a year his absence, and the dangers he was running, divided Mrs. Twist's sorrows into halves. Her position as a widow with an only son in danger touched the imagination of Clark, and she was never so much called upon as during this year. Now Edward was coming home for a rest, and there was a subdued flutter about her, rather like the stirring of the funeral plumes on the heads of hearse-horses.

While he was crossing the Atlantic and Red-Crossing the Twinklers—this was one of Anna-Felicitas's epigrams and she tried Anna-Rose's patience severely by asking her not once but several times whether she didn't think it funny, whereas Anna-Rose disliked it from the first because of the suggestion it contained that Mr. Twist regarded what he did for them as works of mercy—while Mr. Twist was engaged in these activities, at his home in Clark all the things Edith could think of that he used most to like to eat were being got ready. There was an immense slaughtering of chickens, and baking and churning. Edith, who being now the head servant of many instead of three was more than double as hard-worked as she used to be, was on her feet those last few days without stopping. And she had to go and meet Edward in New York as well. Whether Mrs. Twist feared that he might not come straight home or whether it was what she said it was, that dear Edward must not be the only person on the boat who had no one to meet him, is not certain; what is certain is that when it came to the point, and Edith had to start, Mrs. Twist had difficulty in maintaining her usual brightness.

Edith would be a whole day away, and perhaps a night if the St. Luke got in late, for Clark is five hours' train journey from New York, and during all that time Mrs. Twist would be uncared for. She thought Edith surprisingly thoughtless to be so much pleased to go. She examined her flat and sinewy form with disapproval when she came in hatted and booted to say good-bye. No wonder nobody married Edith. And the money wouldn't help her either now—she was too old. She had missed her chances, poor thing.

Mrs. Twist forgot the young man there had been once, years before, when Edward was still in the school room, who had almost married Edith. He was a lusty and enterprising young man, who had come to Clark to stay with a neighbour, and he had had nothing to do through a long vacation, and had taken to dropping in at all hours and interrupting Edith in her housekeeping; and Edith, even then completely flat but of a healthy young uprightness and bright of eyes and hair, had gone silly and forgotten how to cook, and had given her mother, who surely had enough sorrows already, an attack of indigestion.

Mrs. Twist, however, had headed the young man off. Edith was too necessary to her at that time. She could not possibly lose Edith. And besides, the only way to avoid being a widow is not to marry. She told herself that she could not bear the thought of poor Edith's running the risk of an affliction similar to her own. If one hasn't a husband one cannot lose him, Mrs. Twist clearly saw. If Edith married she would certainly lose him unless he lost her. Marriage had only two solutions, she explained to her silent daughter,—she would not, of course, discuss with her that third one which America has so often flown to for solace and relief,—only two, said Mrs. Twist, and they were that either one died oneself, which wasn't exactly a happy thing, or the other one did. It was only a question of time before one of the married was left alone to mourn. Marriage began rosily no doubt, but it always ended black. "And think of my having to see you like this" she said, with a gesture indicating her sad dress.

Edith was intimidated; and the young man presently went away whistling. He was the only one. Mrs. Twist had no more trouble. He passed entirely from her mind; and as she looked at Edith dressed for going to meet Edward in the clothes she went to church in on Sundays, she unconsciously felt a faint contempt for a woman who had had so much time to get married in and yet had never achieved it. She herself had been married at twenty; and her hair even now, after all she had gone through, was hardly more gray than Edith's.

"Your hat's crooked," she said, when Edith straightened herself after bending down to kiss her good-bye; and then, after all unable to bear the idea of being left alone while Edith, with that pleased face, went off to New York to see Edward before she did, she asked her, if she still had a minute to spare, to help her to the sofa, because she felt faint.

"I expect the excitement has been too much for me," she murmured, lying down and shutting her eyes; and Edith, disciplined in affection and attentiveness, immediately took off her hat and settled down to getting her mother well again in time for Edward.

Which is why nobody met Mr. Twist on his arrival in New York, and he accordingly did things, as will be seen, which he mightn't otherwise have done.

---

CHAPTER IX

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.

Round Anna-Rose's waist, safely concealed beneath her skirt from what Anna-Felicitas called the predatory instincts of their fellow-passengers, was a chamois-leather bag containing their passports, a letter to the bank where their £200 was, a letter to those friends of Uncle Arthur's who were to be tried first, a letter to those other friends of his who were to be the second line of defence supposing the first one failed, and ten pounds in two £5 notes.

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.

"A dollar," said Anna-Felicitas, worrying it out, "isn't like a shilling or a mark, but on the other hand neither is it like a pound."

"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.

The young lady of the nails appeared at that moment in a hat so gorgeous that the twins stopped dead to stare. She had a veil on and white gloves, and looked as if she were going for a walk in Fifth Avenue the very next minute.

"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.

Anna-Rose let herself be led away, and they went to their cabin; and when they came out of it half an hour later, no longer with that bald look their caps had given them, the sun catching the little rings of pale gold hair that showed for the first time, and clad, instead of in the disreputable jerseys that they loved, in neat black coats and skirts—for they still wore mourning when properly dressed—with everything exactly as Aunt Alice had directed for their arrival, the young men of the second class could hardly believe their eyes.

"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."

And it was only because it was the other German lady's hair that spent the night in a different part of the cabin from her head and had been seen doing it by Anna-Felicitas, that she cavilled and was grudging. "Gewiss," she muttered back, "bis auf der Nase. Die Nase aber entfremdet mich. Die ist keine echte Junkernase."

So that the Twinklers had quite a success, and their hearts came a little way out of their boots; only a little way, though, for there were the Clouston K. Sacks looming bigger into their lives every minute now.

Really it was a beautiful day, and, as Aunt Alice used to say, that does make such a difference. A clear pale loveliness of light lay over New York, and there was a funny sprightliness in the air, a delicate dry crispness. The trees on the shore, when they got close, were delicate too—delicate pale gold, and green, and brown, and they seemed so composed and calm, the twins thought, standing there quietly after the upheavals and fidgetiness of the Atlantic. New York was well into the Fall, the time of year when it gets nearest to beauty. The beauty was entirely in the atmosphere, and the lights and shadows it made. It was like an exquisite veil flung over an ugly woman, hiding, softening, encouraging hopes.

Everybody on the ship was crowding eagerly to the sides. Everybody was exhilarated, and excited, and ready to be friendly and talkative. They all waved whenever another boat passed. Those who knew America pointed out the landmarks to those who didn't. Mr. Twist pointed them out to the twins, and so did the young man who had remarked favourably on Anna-Felicitas's looks, and as they did it simultaneously and there was so much to look at and so many boats to wave to, it wasn't till they had actually got to the statue of Liberty that Anna-Rose remembered her £10 and the dollars.

The young man was saying how much the statue of Liberty had cost, and the word dollars made Anna-Rose turn with a jump to Mr. Twist.

"Oh," she exclaimed, clutching at her chamois leather bag where it very visibly bulged out beneath her waistband, "I forgot—I must get change. And how much do you think we ought to tip the stewardess? I've never tipped anybody yet ever, and I wish—I wish I hadn't to."

She got quite red. It seemed to her dreadful to offer money to someone so much older than herself and who till almost that very morning had treated her and Anna-Felicitas like the naughtiest of tiresome children. Surely she would be most offended at being tipped by people such years younger than herself?

Mr. Twist thought not.

"A dollar," said the young man. "One dollar. That's the figure. Not a cent more, or you girls'll get inflating prices and Wall Street'll bust up."

Anna-Rose, not heeding him and clutching nervously the place where her bag was, told Mr. Twist that the stewardess hadn't seemed to mind them quite so much last night, and still less that morning, and perhaps some little memento—something that wasn't money—

"Give her those caps of yours," said the young man, bursting into hilarity; but indeed it wasn't his fault that he was a low young man.

Mr. Twist, shutting him out of the conversation by interposing a shoulder, told Anna-Rose he had noticed stewardesses, and also stewards, softened when journeys drew near their end, but that it didn't mean they wanted mementos. They wanted money; and he would do the tipping for her if she liked.

Anna-Rose jumped at it. This tipping of the stewardess had haunted her at intervals throughout the journey whenever she woke up at night. She felt that, not having yet in her life tipped anybody, it was very hard that she couldn't begin with somebody more her own size.

"Then if you don't mind coming behind the funnel," she said, "I can give you my £5 notes, and perhaps you would get them changed for me and deduct what you think the stewardess ought to have."

Mr. Twist, and also Anna-Felicitas, who wasn't allowed to stay behind with the exuberant young man though she was quite unconscious of his presence, went with Anna-Rose behind the funnel, where after a great deal of private fumbling, her back turned to them, she produced the two much-crumpled £5 notes.

"The steward ought to have something too," said Mr. Twist.

"Oh, I'd be glad if you'd do him as well," said Anna-Rose eagerly. "I don't think I could offer him a tip. He has been so fatherly to us. And imagine offering to tip one's father."

Mr. Twist laughed, and said she would get over this feeling in time. He promised to do what was right, and to make it clear that the tips he bestowed were Twinkler tips; and presently he came back with messages of thanks from the tipped—such polite ones from the stewardess that the twins were astonished—and gave Anna-Rose a packet of very dirty-looking slices of green paper, which were dollar bills, he said, besides a variety of strange coins which he spread out on a ledge and explained to her.

"The exchange was favourable to you to-day," said Mr. Twist, counting out the money.

"How nice of it," said Anna-Rose politely. "Did you keep your eye on its variations?" she added a little loudly, with a view to rousing respect in Anna-Felicitas who was lounging against a seat and showing a total absence of every kind of appropriate emotion.

"Certainly," said Mr. Twist after a slight pause. "I kept both my eyes on all of them."

Mr. Twist had, it appeared, presented the steward and stewardess each with a dollar on behalf of the Misses Twinkler, but because the exchange was so favourable this had made no difference to the £5 notes. Reducing each £5 note into German marks, which was the way the Twinklers, in spite of a year in England, still dealt in their heads with money before they could get a clear idea of it, there would have been two hundred marks; and as it took, roughly, four marks to make a dollar, the two hundred marks would have to be divided by four; which, leaving aside that extra complication of variations in the exchange, and regarding the exchange for a moment and for purposes of simplification as keeping quiet for a bit and resting, should produce, also roughly, said Anna-Rose a little out of breath as she got to the end of her calculation, fifty dollars.

"Correct," said Mr. Twist, who had listened with respectful attention. "Here they are."

"I said roughly," said Anna-Rose. "It can't be exactly fifty dollars. The tips anyhow would alter that."

"Yes, but you forget the exchange."

Anna-Rose was silent. She didn't want to go into that before Anna-Felicitas. Of the two, she was supposed to be the least bad at sums. Their mother had put it that way, refusing to say, as Anna-Rose industriously tried to trap her into saying, that she was the better of the two. But even so, the difference entitled her to authority on the subject with Anna-Felicitas, and by dint of doing all her calculations roughly, as she was careful to describe her method, she allowed room for withdrawal and escape where otherwise the inflexibility of figures might have caught her tight and held her down while Anna-Felicitas looked on and was unable to respect her.

Evidently the exchange was something beneficent. She decided to rejoice in it in silence, accept whatever it did, and refrain from asking questions.

"So I did. Of course. The exchange," she said, after a little.

She gathered up the dollar bills and began packing them into her bag. They wouldn't all go in, and she had to put the rest into her pocket, for which also there were too many; but she refused Anna-Felicitas's offer to put some of them in hers on the ground that sooner or later she would be sure to forget they weren't her handkerchief and would blow her nose with them.

"Thank you very much for being so kind," she said to Mr. Twist, as she stuffed her pocket full and tried by vigorous patting to get it to look inconspicuous. "We're never going to forget you, Anna-F. and me. We'll write to you often, and we'll come and see you as often as you like."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas dreamily, as she watched the shore of Long Island sliding past. "Of course you've got your relations, but relations soon pall, and you may be quite glad after a while of a little fresh blood."

Mr. Twist thought this very likely, and agreed with several other things Anna-Felicitas, generalizing from Uncle Arthur, said about relations, again with that air of addressing nobody specially and meaning nothing in particular, while Anna-Rose wrestled with the obesity of her pocket.

"Whether you come to see me or not," said Mr. Twist, whose misgivings as to the effect of the Twinklers on his mother grew rather than subsided, "I shall certainly come to see you."

"Perhaps Mr. Sack won't allow followers," said Anna-Felicitas, her eyes far away. "Uncle Arthur didn't. He wouldn't let the maids have any, so they had to go out and do the following themselves. We had a follower once, didn't we, Anna-R.?" she continued her voice pensive and reminiscent. "He was a friend of Uncle Arthur's. Quite old. At least thirty or forty. I shouldn't have thought he could follow. But he did. And he used to come home to tea with Uncle Arthur and produce boxes of chocolate for us out of his pockets when Uncle Arthur wasn't looking. We ate them and felt perfectly well disposed toward him till one day he tried to kiss one of us—I forget which. And that, combined with the chocolates, revealed him in his true colours as a follower, and we told him they weren't allowed in that house and urged him to go to some place where they were, or he would certainly be overtaken by Uncle Arthur's vengeance, and we said how surprised we were, because he was so old and we didn't know followers were as old as that ever."

"It seemed a very shady thing," said Anna-Rose, having subdued the swollenness of her pocket, "to eat his chocolates and then not want to kiss him, but we don't hold with kissing, Anna-F. and me. Still, we were full of his chocolates; there was no getting away from that. So we talked it over after he had gone, and decided that next day when he came we'd tell him he might kiss one of us if he still wanted to, and we drew lots which it was to be, and it was me, and I filled myself to the brim with chocolates so as to feel grateful enough to bear it, but he didn't come."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't come again for a long while, and when he did there was no follow left in him. Quite the contrary."

Mr. Twist listened with the more interest to this story because it was the first time Anna-Felicitas had talked since he knew her. He was used to the inspiriting and voluble conversation of Anna-Rose who had looked upon him as her best friend since the day he had wiped up her tears; but Anna-Felicitas had been too unwell to talk. She had uttered languid and brief observations from time to time with her eyes shut and her head lolling loosely on her neck, but this was the first time she had been, as it were, an ordinary human being, standing upright on her feet, walking about, looking intelligently if pensively at the scenery, and in a condition of affable readiness, it appeared, to converse.

Mr. Twist was a born mother. The more trouble he was given the more attached he became. He had rolled Anna-Felicitas up in rugs so often that to be not going to roll her up any more was depressing to him. He was beginning to perceive this motherliness in him himself, and he gazed through his spectacles at Anna-Felicitas while she sketched the rise and fall of the follower, and wondered with an almost painful solicitude what her fate would be in the hands of the Clouston Sacks.

Equally he wondered as to the other one's fate; for he could not think of one Twinkler without thinking of the other. They were inextricably mixed together in the impression they had produced on him, and they dwelt together in his thoughts as one person called, generally, Twinklers. He stood gazing at them, his motherly instincts uppermost, his hearty yearning over them now that the hour of parting was so near and his carefully tended chickens were going to be torn from beneath his wing. Mr. Twist was domestic. He was affectionate. He would have loved, though he had never known it, the sensation of pattering feet about his house, and small hands clinging to the apron he would never wear. And it was entirely characteristic of him that his invention, the invention that brought him his fortune, should have had to do with a teapot.

But if his heart was uneasy within him at the prospect of parting from his charges their hearts were equally uneasy, though not in the same way. The very name of Clouston K. Sack was repugnant to Anna-Rose; and Anna-Felicitas, less quick at disliking, turned it over cautiously in her mind as one who turns over an unknown and distasteful object with the nose of his umbrella. Even she couldn't quite believe that any good thing could come out of a name like that, especially when it had got into their lives through Uncle Arthur. Mr. Twist had never heard of the Clouston Sacks, which made Anna-Rose still more distrustful. She wasn't in the least encouraged when he explained the bigness of America and that nobody in it ever knew everybody—she just said that everybody had heard of Mr. Roosevelt, and her heart was too doubtful within her even to mind being told, as he did immediately tell her within ear-shot of Anna-Felicitas, that her reply was unreasonable.

Just at the end, as they were all three straining their eyes, no one with more anxiety than Mr. Twist, to try and guess which of the crowd on the landing-stage were the Clouston Sacks, they passed on their other side the Vaterland, the great interned German liner at its moorings, and the young man who had previously been so very familiar, as Anna-Rose said, but who was only, Mr. Twist explained, being American, came hurrying boldly up.

"You mustn't miss this," he said to Anna-Felicitas, actually seizing her by the arm. "Here's something that'll make you feel home-like right away."

And he led her off, and would have dragged her off but for Anna-Felicitas's perfect non-resistance.

"He is being familiar," said Anna-Rose to Mr. Twist, turning very red and following quickly after him. "That's not just being American. Everybody decent knows that if there's any laying hold of people's arms to be done one begins with the eldest sister."

"Perhaps he doesn't realize that you are the elder," said Mr. Twist. "Strangers judge, roughly, by size."

"I'm afraid I'm going to have trouble with her," said Anna-Rose, not heeding his consolations. "It isn't a sinecure, I assure you, being left sole guardian and protector of somebody as pretty as all that. And the worst of it is she's going on getting prettier. She hasn't nearly come to the end of what she can do in that direction. I see it growing on her. Every Sunday she's inches prettier than she was the Sunday before. And wherever I take her to live, and however out of the way it is, I'm sure the path to our front door is going to be black with suitors."

This dreadful picture so much perturbed her, and she looked up at Mr. Twist with such worried eyes, that he couldn't refrain from patting her on her shoulder.

"There, there," said Mr. Twist, and he begged her to be sure to let him know directly she was in the least difficulty, or even perplexity,—"about the suitors, for instance, or anything else. You must let me be of some use in the world, you know," he said.

"But we shouldn't like it at all if we thought you were practising being useful on us," said Anna-Rose "It's wholly foreign to our natures to enjoy being the objects of anybody's philanthropy."

"Now I just wonder where you get all your long words from," said Mr. Twist soothingly; and Anna-Rose laughed, and there was only one dimple in the Twinkler family and Anna-Rose had got it.

"What do you want to get looking at that for?" she asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd staring at the Vaterland, and got to where Anna-Felicitas stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang the young man was treating her to,—that terse, surprising, swift hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was hearing in such abundance for the first time.

The American passengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the impotence of the great ship. Every one of them seemed to be violently pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the Vaterland as every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and presently arrived again,—the same ships she had seen depart coming back unharmed, unhindered by her country's submarines. Only the two German ladies, once more ignoring their American allegiance, looked angry. It was incredible to them, simply unfassbar as they said in their thoughts, that any nation should dare inconvenience Germans, should dare lay a finger, even the merest friendliest detaining one, on anything belonging to the mighty, the inviolable Empire. Well, these Americans, these dollar-grubbing Yankees, would soon get taught a sharp, deserved lesson—but at this point they suddenly remembered they were Americans themselves, and pulled up their thoughts violently, as it were, on their haunches.

They turned, however, bitterly to the Twinkler girl as she pushed her way through to her sister,—those renegade Junkers, those contemptible little apostates—and asked her, after hearing her question to Anna-Felicitas, with an extraordinary breaking out of pent-up emotion where she, then, supposed she would have been at that moment if it hadn't been for Germany.

"Not here I think," said Anna-Rose, instantly and fatally ready as she always was to answer back and attempt what she called reasoned conversation. "There wouldn't have been a war, so of course I wouldn't have been here."

"Why, you wouldn't so much as have been born without Germany," said the lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English lie as to who began the war. "You owe your very existence to Germany. You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of life, instead of jeering at this representative—" she flung a finger out toward the Vaterland—"this patient and dignified-in -temporary-misfortune representative, of her power."

"I wasn't jeering," said Anna-Rose, defending herself and clutching at Anna-Felicitas's sleeve to pull her away.

"You wouldn't have had a father at all but for Germany," said the other lady, the one whose hair grew.

"And perhaps you will tell me," said the first one, "where you would have been then."

"I don't believe," said Anna-Rose, her nose in the air, "I don't believe I'd have ever been at a loss for a father."

The ladies, left speechless a moment by the arrogance as well as several other things about this answer gave Anna-Rose an opportunity for further reasoning with them, which she was unable to resist. "There are lots of fathers," she said, "in England, who would I'm sure have been delighted to take me on if Germany had failed me."

"England!"

"Take you on!"

"An English father for you? For a subject of the King of Prussia?"

"I—I'm afraid I—I'm going to be sick," gasped Anna-Felicitas suddenly.

"You're never going to be sick in this bit of bathwater, Miss Twinkler?" exclaimed the young man, with the instant ungrudging admiration of one who is confronted by real talent. "My, what a gift!"

Anna-Rose darted at Anna-Felicitas's drooping head, that which she had been going to say back to the German ladies dissolving on her tongue. "Oh no—no—" she wailed. "Oh no—not in your best hat, Columbus darling—you can't—it's not done—and your hat'll shake off into the water, and then there'll only be one between us and we shall never be able to go out paying calls and things at the same time—come away and sit down—Mr. Twist—Mr. Twist—oh, please come—"

Anna-Felicitas allowed herself to be led away, just in time as she murmured, and sat down on the nearest seat and shut her eyes. She was thankful Anna-Rose's attention had been diverted to her so instantly, for it would have been very difficult to be sick with the ship as quiet as one's own bedroom. Nothing short of the engine-room could have made her sick now. She sat keeping her eyes shut and Anna-Rose's attention riveted, wondering what she would do when there was no ship and Anna-Rose was on the verge of hasty and unfortunate argument. Would she have to learn to faint? But that would terrify poor Christopher so dreadfully.

Anna-Felicitas pondered, her eyes shut, on this situation. Up to now in her life she had always found that situations solved themselves. Given time. And sometimes a little assistance. So, no doubt, would this one. Anna-Rose would ripen and mellow. The German ladies would depart hence and be no more seen; and it was unlikely she and Anna-Rose would meet at such close quarters as a ship's cabin any persons so peculiarly and unusually afflicting again. All situations solved themselves; or, if they showed signs of not going to, one adopted the gentle methods that helped them to get solved. Early in life she had discovered that objects which cannot be removed or climbed over can be walked round. A little deviousness, and the thing was done. She herself had in the most masterly manner when she was four escaped church-going for several years by a simple method, that seemed to her looking back very like an inspiration, of getting round it. She had never objected to going, had never put into words the powerful if vague dislike with which it filled her when Sunday after Sunday she had to go and dangle her legs helplessly for two hours from the chair she was put on in the enclosed pew reserved for the hohe gräfliche Herrschaften from the Slosh.

Her father, a strict observer of the correct and a pious believer in God for other people, attended Divine Service as regularly as he wound the clocks and paid the accounts. He repräsentierte, as the German phrase went; and his wife and children were expected to repräsentieren too. Which they did uncomplainingly; for when one has to do with determined husbands and fathers it is quickest not to complain. But the pins and needles that patient child endured, Anna-Felicitas remembered, looking back through the years at the bunched-up figure on the chair as at a stranger, were something awful. The edge of the chair just caught her legs in the pins and needles place. If she had been a little bigger or a little smaller it wouldn't have happened; as it was, St. Paul wrestling with beasts at Ephesus wasn't more heroic than Anna-Felicitas perceived that distant child to have been, silently Sunday after Sunday bearing her legs. Then one Sunday something snapped inside her, and she heard her own voice floating out into the void above the heads of the mumbling worshippers, and it said with a terrible distinctness in a sort of monotonous wail: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"—and a second time, in the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon this: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"—and a third time she opened her mouth to repeat the outrageous statement, regardless of her mother's startled hand laid on her arm, and of Anna-Rose's petrified stare, and of the lifted faces of the congregation, and of the bent, scandalized brows of the pastor,—impelled by something that possessed her, unable to do anything but obey it; but her father, a man of deeds, rose up in his place, took her in his arms, and carried her down the stairs and out of the church. And the minute she found herself really rescued, and out where the sun and wind, her well-known friends, were larking about among the tombstones, she laid her cheek as affectionately against her father's head as if she were a daughter to be proud of, and would have purred if she had had had a purr as loudly as the most satisfied and virtuous of cats.

"Mein Kind," said her father, standing her up on a convenient tomb so that her eyes were level with his, "is it then true about the cold potato?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas patting his face, pleased at what her legs were feeling like again.

"Mein Kind," said her father, "do you not know it is wrong to lie?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas placidly, the heavenly blue of her eyes, gazing straight into his, exactly like the mild sky above the trees.

"No?" echoed her father, staring at her. "But, Kind, you know what a lie is?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him tenderly in her satisfaction at being restored to a decent pair of legs; and as he still stood staring at her she put her hands one on each of his cheeks and squeezed his face together and murmured, "Oh, I do love you."

---

CHAPTER X

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....

"You know if you could manage to feel a little better, Anna-F.," said Anna-Rose's voice entreatingly in her ear, "it's time we began to get off this ship."

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."

"Those Sacks—" began Anna-Rose; and then she finished irrelevantly by remarking that it was the details of life that were discouraging,—from which Anna Felicitas knew that Christopher's heart was once more in her boots.

"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."

It had never occurred to either of the twins that the Clouston Sacks would not meet them. They had taken it for granted from the beginning that some form of Sack, either male or female, or at least their plenipotentiary, would be on the wharf to take them away to the Sack lair, as Anna-Felicitas alluded to the family mansion. It was, they knew, in Boston, but Boston conveyed nothing to them. Only Mr. Twist knew how far away it was. He had always supposed the Sacks would meet their young charges, stay that night in New York, and continue on to Boston next day. The twins were so certain they would be met that Mr. Twist was certain too. He had concluded, with a growingly empty feeling in his heart as the time of separation drew near, that all that now remained for him to do on behalf of the Twinklers was to hand them over to the Sacks. And then leave them. And then go home to that mother he loved but had for some time known he didn't like,—go home a bereft and lonely man.

But out of the crowd on the pier, any of whom might have been Sacks for all the Twinklers, eagerly scanning faces, knew, nobody in fact seemed to be Sacks. At least, nobody came forward and said, "Are you the Twinklers?" Other people fell into each other's arms; the air was full of the noise of kissing, the loud legitimate kissing of relations; but nobody took any notice of the twins. For a long while they stood waiting. Their luggage was examined, and Mr. Twist's luggage—only his was baggage—was examined, and the kissing and exclaiming crowd swayed hither and thither, and broke up into groups, and was shot through by interviewers, and got packed off into taxis, and grew thinner and thinner, and at last was so thin that the concealment of the Sacks in it was no longer possible.

There were no Sacks.

To the last few groups of people left in the great glass-roofed hall piled with bags of wool and sulphur, Mr. Twist went up boldly and asked if they were intending to meet some young ladies called Twinkler. His tone, owing to perturbation, was rather more than one of inquiry, it almost sounded menacing; and the answers he got were cold. He wandered about uncertainly from group to group, his soft felt hat on the back of his head and his brow getting more and more puckered; and Anna-Rose, anxiously looking on from afar, became impatient at last of these refusals of everybody to be Sacks, and thought that perhaps Mr. Twist wasn't making himself clear.

Impetuous by nature and little given to calm waiting, she approached a group on her own account and asked them, enunciating her words very clearly, whether they were by any chance Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack.

The group, which was entirely female, stared round and down at her in astonished silence, and shook its heads; and as she saw Mr. Twist being turned away for the fifth time in the distance a wave of red despair came over her, and she said, reproach in her voice and tears in her eyes, "But somebody's got to be the Sacks."

Upon which the group she was addressing stared at her in a more astonished silence than ever.

Mr. Twist came up mopping his brow and took he arm and led her back to Anna-Felicitas, who was taking care of the luggage and had sat down philosophically to await developments on a bag of sulphur. She didn't yet know what sulphur looked like on one's clothes after one has sat on it, and smiled cheerfully and encouragingly at Anna-Rose as she came towards her.

"There are no Sacks," said Anna-Rose, facing the truth.

"It's exactly like that Uncle Arthur of yours," said Mr. Twist, mopping his forehead and speaking almost vindictively. "Exactly like him. A man like that would have the sort of friends that don't meet one."

"Well, we must do without the Sacks," said Anna-Felicitas, rising from the sulphur bag with the look of serene courage that can only dwell on the face of one who is free from care as to what has happened to him behind. "And it isn't," she added sweetly to Mr. Twist, "as if we hadn't got you."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, suddenly seeing daylight. "Of course. What do Sacks really matter? I mean, for a day or two? You'll take us somewhere where we can wait till we've found them."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "Some nice quiet old-fashioned coffee-house sort of place, like the one the Brontes went to in St. Paul's Churchyard the first time they were launched into the world."

"Yes. Some inexpensive place."

"Suited to the frugal."

"Because although we've got £200, even that will need watching or it will go."

During this conversation Mr. Twist stood mopping his forehead. As often as he mopped it it broke out afresh and had to be mopped again. They were the only passengers left now, and had become very conspicuous. He couldn't but perceive that a group of officials with grim, locked-up-looking mouths were eyeing him and the Twinklers attentively.

Always zealous in the cause of virtue, America provided her wharves and landing-places with officials specially appointed to guard the purity of family life. Family life obviously cannot be pure without a marriage being either in it or having at some time or other passed through it. The officials engaged in eyeing Mr. Twist and the twins were all married themselves, and were well acquainted with that awful purity. But eye the Twist and Twinkler party as they might, they could see no trace of marriage anywhere about it.

On the contrary, the man of the party looked so uneasy that it amounted to conscious illegality.

"Sisters?" said the chief official, stepping forward abruptly.

"Eh?" said Mr. Twist, pausing in the wiping of his forehead.

"These here—" said the official, jerking his thumb at the twins. "They your sisters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with one voice. "Do you think we look like him?"

"Daughters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with an ever greater vigour of repudiation. "You can't really think we look as much like him as all that?"

"Wife and sister-in-law?"

Then the Twinklers laughed. They laughed aloud, even Anna-Rose forgetting her cares for a moment. But they were flattered, because it was at least a proof that they looked thoroughly grown-up.

"Then if they ain't your sisters, and they ain't your daughters, and they ain't your wife and sister-in-law, p'raps you'll tell me—"

"These young ladies are not anything at all of mine, sir," said Mr. Twist vehemently.

"Don't you get sir-ing me, now," said the official sticking out his jaw. "This is a free country, and I'll have no darned cheek."

"These young ladies in no way belong to me," said Mr. Twist more patiently. "They're my friends."

"Oh. Friends, are they? Then p'raps you'll tell me what you're going to do with them next."

"Do with them?" repeated Mr. Twist, as he stared with puckered brow at the twins. "That's exactly what I wish I knew."

The official scanned him from head to foot with triumphant contempt. He had got one of them, anyhow. He felt quite refreshed already. There had been a slump in sinners the past week, and he was as full of suppressed energy and as much tormented by it as an unexercised and overfed horse. "Step this way," he ordered curtly, waving Mr. Twist towards a wooden erection that was apparently an office. "Oh, don't you worry about the girls," he added, as his prey seemed disinclined to leave them.

But Mr. Twist did worry. He saw Ellis Island looming up behind the two figures that were looking on in an astonishment that had not yet had time to turn into dismay as he was marched off out of sight. "I'll be back in a minute," he called over his shoulder.

"That's as may be," remarked the official grimly.

But he was back; if not in a minute in a little more than five minutes, still accompanied by the official, but an official magically changed into tameness and amiability, desirous to help, instructing his inferiors to carry Mr. Twist's and the young ladies' baggage to a taxi.

It was the teapot that had saved him,—that blessed teapot that was always protruding itself benevolently into his life. Mr. Twist had identified himself with it, and it had instantly saved him. In the shelter of his teapot Mr. Twist could go anywhere and do anything in America. Everybody had it. Everybody knew it. It was as pervasive of America as Ford's cars, but cosily, quietly pervasive. It was only less visible because it stayed at home. It was more like a wife than Ford's cars were. From a sinner caught red-handed, Mr. Twist, its amiable creator, leapt to the position of one who can do no wrong, for he had not only placed his teapot between himself and judgment but had accompanied his proofs of identity by a suitable number of dollar bills, pressed inconspicuously into the official's conveniently placed hand.

The twins found themselves being treated with distinction. They were helped into the taxi by the official himself, and what was to happen to them next was left entirely to the decision and discretion of Mr. Twist—a man so much worried that at that moment he hadn't any of either. He couldn't even answer when asked where the taxi was to go to. He had missed his train, and he tried not to think of his mother's disappointment, the thought was so upsetting. But he wouldn't have caught it if he could, for how could he leave these two poor children?

"I'm more than ever convinced," he said, pushing his hat still further off his forehead, and staring at the back of the Twinkler trunks piled up in front of him next to the driver, while the disregarded official at the door still went on asking him where he wished the cab to go to, "that children should all have parents."

---

CHAPTER XI

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 forget we've got to husband our resources," said Anna-Felicitas.

"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.

"Get right in then, and I'll take you back to the Ritz," said the driver.

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.

"Our what?" said Anna-Rose, to whom the expression was new. "Do you mean our bags?"

"No. Grips. These here," said the youth.

"Is that what they're called in America?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with the intelligent interest of a traveller determined to understand and appreciate everything, while Anna-Rose, still greatly upset by the condition of the best skirt but unwilling to expatiate upon it before the youth, continued to brush her down as best she could with her handkerchief.

"I don't call them. It's what they are," said the youth. "What I want to know is, are they all here?"

"How interesting that you don't drop your h's," said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him. "The rest of you is so like no h's."

The youth said nothing to that, the line of thought being one he didn't follow.

"Those are all our—grips, I think," said Anna-Rose counting them round the corner of Anna-Felicitas's skirt. "Thank you very much," she added after a pause, as he still lingered.

But this didn't cause him to disappear as it would have in England. Instead, he picked up a metal bottle with a stopper off the table, and shook it and announced that their ice-water bottle was empty. "Want some ice water?" he inquired.

"What for?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"What for?" echoed the youth.

"Thank you," said Anna-Rose, who didn't care about the youth's manner which seemed to her familiar, "we don't want ice water, but we should be glad of a little hot water."

"You'll get all you want of that in there," said the youth, jerking his head towards a door that led into a bathroom. "It's ice water and ink that you get out of me."

"Really?" said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him with even more intelligent interest, almost as if she were prepared, it being America, a country, she had heard, of considerable mechanical ingenuity, to find his person bristling with taps which only needed turning.

"We don't want either, thank you," said Anna-Rose.

The youth lingered. Anna-Rose's brushing began to grow vehement. Why didn't he go? She didn't want to have to be rude to him and hurt his feelings by asking him to go, but why didn't he? Anna-Felicitas, who was much too pleasantly detached, thought Anna-Rose, for such a situation, the door being wide open to the passage and the ungetridable youth standing there staring, was leisurely taking off her hat and smoothing her hair.

"Suppose you're new to this country," said the youth after a pause.

"Brand," said Anna-Felicitas pleasantly.

"Then p'raps," said the youth, "you don't know that the feller who brings up your grips gets a tip."

"Of course we know that," said Anna-Rose, standing up straight and trying to look stately.

"Then if you know why don't you do it?"

"Do it?" she repeated, endeavouring to chill him into respectfulness by haughtily throwing back her head. "Of course we shall do it. At the proper time and place."

"Which is, as you must have noticed," added Anna-Felicitas gently, "departure and the front door."

"That's all right," said the youth, "but that's only one of the times and places. That's the last one. Where we've got to now is the first one."

"Do I understand," said Anna-Rose, trying to be very dignified, while her heart shrank within her, for what sort of sum did one offer people like this?—"that to America one tips at the beginning as well?"

"Yep," said the youth. "And in the middle too. Right along through. Never miss an opportunity, is as good a slogan as you'll get when it comes to tipping."

"I believe you'd have liked Kipps," said Anna-Felicitas meditatively, shaking some dust off her hat and remembering the orgy of tipping that immortal young man went in for at the seaside hotel.

"What I like now," said the youth, growing more easy before their manifest youth and ignorance, "is tips. Guess you can call it Kipps if it pleases you."

Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse "It's horrid, I think, to ask for presents," she said to the youth in deep humiliation, more on his account than hers.

"Presents? I'm not asking for presents. I'm telling you what's done," said the youth. And he had spots on his face. And he was repugnant to her.

Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a shilling. He took it, and remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it went away; and Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist knocked and asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.

"He might have said thank you," she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas, giving a final desperate brushing to the sulphur.

"I expect he'll come to a bad end," said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables laid for dinner. It wasn't the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort. The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing their detachment from it by sitting in a corner of the room playing dominoes. It was a big room, all looking-glasses and windows, and the street outside was badly paved and a great noise of passing motor-vans came in and drowned most of what Mr. Twist was saying. It was an unlovely place, a place in which one might easily feel homesick and that the world was empty of affection, if one let oneself go that way. The twins wouldn't. They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be daunted by these externals. For there was Mr. Twist, their friend and stand-by, still with them, and hadn't they got each other? But they felt uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied them with buttered toast and macaroons and was as attentive as usual, had a somnambulatory quality in his attention. He looked like a man who is doing things in a dream. He looked like one who is absorbed in something else. His forehead still was puckered, and what could it be puckered about, seeing that he had got home, and was going back to his mother, and had a clear and uncomplicated future ahead of him, and anyhow was a man?

"Have you got something on your mind?" asked Anna-Rose at last, when he hadn't even heard a question she asked,—he, the polite, the interested, the sympathetic friend of the journey across.

Mr. Twist, sitting tilted back in his chair, his hands deep in his pockets, looked up from the macaroons he had been staring at and said, "Yes."

"Tell us what it is," suggested Anna-Felicitas.

"You," said Mr. Twist.

"Me?"

"Both of you. You both of you go together. You're in one lump in my mind. And on it too," finished Mr. Twist ruefully.

"That's only because," explained Anna-Felicitas, "you've got the idea we want such a lot of taking care of. Get rid of that, and you'll feel quite comfortable again. Why not regard us merely as pleasant friends?"

Mr. Twist looked at her in silence.

"Not as objects to be protected," continued Anna Felicitas, "but as co-equals. Of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting."

Mr. Twist continued to look at her in silence.

"We didn't come to America to be on anybody's mind," said Anna-Rose, supporting Anna-Felicitas.

"We had a good deal of that in England," said Anna-Felicitas. "For instance, we're quite familiar with Uncle Arthur's mind, we were on it so heavily and so long."

"It's our fixed determination," said Anna-Rose, "now that we're starting a new life, to get off any mind we find ourselves on instantly."

"We wish to carve out our own destinies," said Anna-Felicitas.

"We more than wish to," corrected Anna-Rose, "we intend to. What were we made in God's image for if it wasn't to stand upright on our own feet?"

"Anna-Rose and I had given this a good deal of thought," said Anna-Felicitas, "first and last, and we're prepared to be friends with everybody, but only as co-equals and of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting."

"I don't know exactly," said Mr. Twist, "what that means, but it seems to give you a lot of satisfaction."

"It does. It's out of the Athanasian Creed, and suggests such perfect equality. If you'll regard us as co-equals instead of as objects to be looked after, you'll see how happy we shall all be."

"Not," said Anna-Rose, growing tender, for indeed in her heart she loved and clung to Mr. Twist, "that we haven't very much liked all you've done for us and the way you were so kind to us on the boat,—we've been most obliged to you, and we shall miss you very much indeed, I know."

"But we'll get over that of course in time," put in Anna-Felicitas, "and we've got to start life now in earnest."

"Well then," said Mr. Twist, "will you two Annas kindly tell me what it is you propose to do next?"

"Next? After tea? Go and look at the sights."

"I mean to-morrow," said Mr. Twist.

"To-morrow," said Anna-Rose, "we proceed to Boston."

"To track the Clouston Sacks to their lair," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Ah. You've made up your minds to do that. They've behaved abominably," said Mr. Twist.

"Perhaps they missed the train," said Anna-Felicitas mildly.

"It's the proper course to pursue," said Anna-Rose. "To proceed to Boston."

"I suppose it is," said Mr. Twist, again thinking that the really proper and natural course was for him to have been able to take them to his mother. Pity one's mother wasn't—

He pulled himself up on the brink of an unfiliality. He was on the verge of thinking it a pity one's mother wasn't a different one.

---

CHAPTER XII

"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.

So the twins gave themselves up for that one evening to what Anna-Felicitas called government by wealth, otherwise plutocracy, while reserving complete freedom of action in regard to Mr. Sack, who was, in their ignorance of his circumstances, an unknown quantity. They might be going to be mothers' helps in the Sack ménage for all they knew,—they might, they said, be going to be anything, from honoured guests to typists.

"Can you type?" asked Mr. Twist.

"No," said the twins.

He took them in a taxi to Riverside Drive, and then they walked down to the charming footpath that runs along by the Hudson for three enchanting miles. The sun had set some time before they got there, and had left a clear pale yellow sky, and a wonderful light on the river. Lamps were being lit, and hung like silver globes in the thin air. Steep grass slopes, and groups of big trees a little deeper yellow than the sky, hid that there were houses and a street above them on their right. Up and down the river steamers passed, pierced with light, their delicate smoke hanging in the air long after they had gone their way. It was so great a joy to walk in all this after ten days shut up on the St. Luke and to see such blessed things as grass and leaves again, that the twins felt suddenly extraordinarily brisked up and cheerful. It was impossible not to be cheerful, translated from the St. Luke into such a place, trotting along in the peculiar dry air that made one all tingly.

The world seemed suddenly quite good,—the simplest, easiest of objects to tackle. All one had to do was not to let it weigh on one, to laugh rather than cry. They trotted along humming bits of their infancy's songs, feeling very warm and happy inside, felicitously full of tea and macaroons and with their feet comfortably on something that kept still and didn't heave or lurch beneath them. Mr. Twist, too, was gayer than he had been for some hours. He seemed relieved; and he was. He had sent a telegram to his mother, expressing proper sorrow at being detained in New York, but giving no reason for it, and promising he would be with her rather late the next evening; and he had sent a telegram to the Clouston Sacks saying the Twinklers, who had so unfortunately missed them in New York, would arrive in Boston early next afternoon. His mind was clear again owing to the determination of the twins to go to the Sacks. He was going to take them there, hand them over, and then go back to Clark, which fortunately was only three hours' journey from Boston.

If the twins had shown a disinclination to go after the Sacks who, in Mr. Twist's opinion, had behaved shamefully already, he wouldn't have had the heart to press them to go; and then what would he have done with them? Their second and last line of defence, supposing they had considered the Sacks had failed and were to be ruled out, was in California, a place they spoke of as if it were next door to Boston and New York. How could he have let them set out alone on that four days' journey, with the possibility of once more at its end not being met? No wonder he had been abstracted at tea. He was relieved to the extent of his forehead going quite smooth again at their decision to proceed to the Sacks. For he couldn't have taken them to his mother without preparation and explanation, and he couldn't have left them in New York while he went and prepared and explained. Great, reflected Mr. Twist, the verb dropping into his mind with the aplomb of an inspiration, are the difficulties that beset a man directly he begins to twinkle. Already he had earnestly wished to knock the reception clerk in the hotel office down because of, first, his obvious suspicion of the party before he had heard Mr. Twist's name, and because of, second, his politeness, his confidential manner as of an understanding sympathizer with a rich man's recreations, when he had. The tea, which he, had poured out of one of his own teapots, had been completely spoilt by the knowledge that it was only this teapot that had saved him from being treated as a White Slave Trafficker. He wouldn't have got into that hotel at all with the Twinklers, or into any other decent one, except for his teapot. What a country, Mr. Twist had thought, fresh from his work in France, fresh from where people were profoundly occupied with the great business of surviving at all. Here he came back from a place where civilization toppled, where deadly misery, deadly bravery, heroism that couldn't be uttered, staggered month after month among ruins, and found America untouched, comfortable, fat, still with time to worry over the suspected amorousness of the rich, still putting people into uniforms in order to buttonhole a man on landing and cross-question him as to his private purities.

He had been much annoyed, but he too couldn't resist the extreme pleasure of real exercise on such a lovely evening, nor could he resist the infection of the cheerfulness of the Twinklers. They walked along, talking and laughing, and seeming to walk much faster than he did, especially Anna-Rose who had to break into a run every few steps because of his so much longer legs, his face restored to all its usual kindliness as he listened benevolently to their remarks, and just when they were beginning to feel as if they soon might be tired and hungry a restaurant with lamp-hung gardens appeared as punctually as if they had been in Germany, that land of nicely arranged distances between meals. They had an extremely cheerful little supper out of doors, with things to eat that thrilled the Twinklers in their delicious strangeness; heavenly food, they thought it after the rigours of the second-class cooking on the St. Luke, and the biggest ices they had seen in their lives,—great dollops of pink and yellow divineness.

Then Mr. Twist took them in a taxi to look at the illuminated advertisements in Broadway, and they forgot everything but the joy of the moment. Whatever the next day held, this evening was sheer happiness. Their eyes shone and their cheeks flushed, and Mr. Twist was quite worried that they were so pretty. People at the other tables at the restaurant had stared at them with frank admiration, and so did the people in the streets whenever the taxi was blocked. On the ship he had only sometimes been aware of it,—there would come a glint of sunshine and settle on Anna-Rose's little cheek where the dimple was, or he would lift his eyes from the Culture book and suddenly see the dark softness of Anna-Felicitas's eyelashes as she slept in her chair. But now, dressed properly, and in their dryland condition of cheerful animation, he perceived that they were very pretty indeed, and that Anna-Felicitas was more than very pretty. He couldn't help thinking they were a most unsuitable couple to be let loose in America with only two hundred pounds to support them. Two hundred pounds was just enough to let them slip about if it should enter their heads to slip about,—go off without explanation, for instance, if they wanted to leave the Clouston Sacks,—but of course ridiculous as a serious background to life. A girl should either have enough money or be completely dependent on her male relations. As a girl was usually young reflected Mr. Twist, his spectacles with the Broadway lights in them blazing on the two specimens opposite him, it was safest for her to be dependent. So were her actions controlled, and kept within the bounds of wisdom.

And next morning, as he sat waiting for the twins for breakfast at ten o'clock according to arrangement the night before, their grape-fruit in little beds of ice on their plates and every sort of American dish ordered, from griddle cakes and molasses to chicken pie, a page came in with loud cries for Mr. Twist, which made him instantly conspicuous—a thing he particularly disliked—and handed him a letter.

The twins had gone.

---

CHAPTER XIII

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.

It took some time, because of Anna-Rose being the eldest. Anna-Felicitas had had to be as wary, and gentle, and persistently affectionate as a wife whom necessity compels to try and get reason into her husband. Anna-Rose's feathers, even as the feathers of a husband, bristled at the mere breath of criticism of her superior intelligence and wisdom. She was the leader of the party, the head and guide, the one who had the dollars in her pocket, and being the eldest naturally must know best. Besides, she was secretly nervous about taking Anna-Felicitas about alone. She too had observed the stares of the public, and had never supposed that any of them might be for her. How was she to get to Boston successfully with so enchanting a creature, through all the complications of travel in an unknown country, without the support and counsel of Mr. Twist? Just the dollars and quarters and dimes and cents cowed her. The strangeness of everything, while it delighted her so long as she could peep at it from behind Mr. Twist, appalled her the minute she was left alone with it. America seemed altogether a foreign country, a strange place whose inhabitants by accident didn't talk in a strange language. They talked English; or rather what sounded like English till you found that it wasn't really.

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.

It was a letter profuse in thanks for all Mr. Twist had done for them, and couched in language that betrayed the particular share Anna-Felicitas had taken in the plan; for though they both loved long words Anna-Felicitas's were always a little the longer. In rolling sentences that made Mr. Twist laugh in spite of his concern, they pointed out that his first duty was to his mother, and his second was not to squander his possessions in paying the hotel and railway bills of persons who had no sort of claim on him, except those general claims of humanity which he had already on the St. Luke so amply discharged. They would refrain from paying their hotel bill, remembering his words as to the custom of the country, though their instincts were altogether against this course, but they could and would avoid causing him the further expense and trouble and waste of his no doubt valuable time of taking them to Boston, by the simple process of going there without him. They promised to write from the Sacks and let him know of their arrival to the address at Clark he had given them, and they would never forget him as long as they lived and remained his very sincerely, A.-R., and A.-F. Twinkler.

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.

Meanwhile the twins, after a brief struggle of extraordinary intensity at the station in getting their tickets, trying to understand the black man who seized and dealt with their luggage, and closely following him wherever he went in case he should disappear, were sitting in a state of relaxation and relief in the Boston express, their troubles over for at least several hours.

The black porter, whose heart happened not to be black and who had children of his own, perceived the helpless ignorance that lay behind the twins' assumption a of severe dignity, and took them in hand and got seats for them in the parlour car. As they knew nothing about cars, parlour or otherwise, but had merely and quite uselessly reiterated to the booking-clerk, till their porter intervened, that they wanted third-class tickets, they accepted these seats, thankful in the press and noise round them to get anything so roomy and calm as these dignified arm-chairs; and it wasn't till they had been in them some time, their feet on green footstools, with attendants offering them fruit and chocolates and magazines at intervals just as if they had been in heaven, as Anna-Felicitas remarked admiringly, that counting their money they discovered what a hole the journey had made in it. But they were too much relieved at having accomplished so much on their own, quite uphelped for the first time since leaving Aunt Alice, to take it particularly to heart; and, as Anna-Felicitas said, there was still the £200, and, as Anna-Rose said, it wasn't likely they'd go in a train again for ages; and anyhow, as Anna-Felicitas said, whatever it had cost they were bound to get away from being constant drains on Mr. Twist's purse.

The train journey delighted them. To sit so comfortably and privately in chairs that twisted round, so that if a passenger should start staring at Anna-Felicitas one could make her turn her back altogether on him; to have one's feet on footstools when they were the sort of feet that don't reach the ground; to see the lovely autumn country flying past, hills and woods and fields and gardens golden in the October sun, while the horrible Atlantic was nowhere in sight; to pass through towns so queerly reminiscent of English and German towns shaken up together and yet not a bit like either; to be able to have the window wide open without getting soot in one's eyes because one of the ministering angels—clad, this one, appropriately to heaven, in white, though otherwise black—pulled up the same sort of wire screen they used to have in the windows at home to keep out the mosquitoes; to imitate about twelve, when they grew bold because they were so hungry, the other passengers and cause the black angel to spread a little table between them and bring clam broth, which they ordered in a spirit of adventure and curiosity and concealed from each other that they didn't like; to have the young man who passed up and down with the candy, and whose mouth was full of it, grow so friendly that he offered them toffee from his own private supply at last when they had refused regretfully a dozen suggestions to buy—"Have a bit," he said, thrusting it under their noses. "As a gentleman to ladies—no pecuniary obligations—come on, now;" all this was to the twins too interesting and delightful for words.

They accepted the toffee in the spirit in which it was offered, and since nobody can eat somebody's toffee without being pleasant in return, intermittent amenities passed between them and the young man as he journeyed up and down through the cars.

"First visit to the States?" he inquired, when with some reluctance, for presently it appeared to the twins that the clam broth and the toffee didn't seem to be liking each other now they had got together inside them, and also for fear of hurting his feelings if they refused, they took some more.

They nodded and smiled stickily.

"English, I guess."

They hesitated, covering their hesitation with the earnest working of their toffee-filled jaws.

Then Anna-Felicitas, her cheek distorted, gave him the answer she had given the captain of the St. Luke, and said, "Practically."

"Ah," said the young man, turning this over in his mind, the r in "practically" having rolled as no English or American r ever did; but the conductor appearing in the doorway he continued on his way.

"It's evident," said Anna-Rose, speaking with difficulty, for her jaws clave together because of the toffee, "that we're going to be asked that the first thing every time a fresh person speaks to us. We'd better decide what we're going to say, and practise saying it without hesitation."

Anna-Felicitas made a sound of assent.

"That answer of yours about practically," continued Anna-Rose, swallowing her bit of toffee by accident and for one moment afraid it would stick somewhere and make her die, "causes first surprise, then reflection, and then suspicion."

"But," said Anna-Felicitas after a pause during which she had disentangled her jaws, "it's going to be difficult to say one is German when America seems to be so very neutral and doesn't like Germans. Besides, it's only in the eye of the law that we are. In God's eye we're not, and that's the principal eye after all."

Her own eyes grew thoughtful. "I don't believe," she said, "that parents when they marry have any idea of all the difficulties they're going to place their children in."

"I don't believe they think about it at all," said Anna-Rose. "I mean," she added quickly, lest she should be supposed to be questioning the perfect love and forethought of their mother, "fathers don't."

They were silent a little after this, each thinking things tinged to sobriety by the effect of the inner conflict going on between the clam broth and the toffee. Also Boston was rushing towards them, and the Clouston Sacks. Quite soon they would have to leave the peaceful security of the train and begin to be active again, and quick and clever. Anna-Felicitas, who was slow, found it difficult ever to be clever till about the week after, and Anna-Rose, who was impetuous, was so impetuous that she entirely outstripped her scanty store of cleverness and landed panting and surprised in situations she hadn't an idea what to do with. The Clouston Sacks, now—Aunt Alice had said, "You must take care to be very tactful with Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack;" and when Anna-Rose, her forehead as much puckered as Mr. Twist's in her desire to get exactly at what tactful was in order to be able diligently to be it, asked for definitions, Aunt Alice only said it was what gentlewomen were instinctively.

"Then," observed Anna-Felicitas, when on nearing Boston Anna-Rose repeated Aunt Alice's admonishment and at the same time provided Anna-Felicitas for her guidance with the definition, "seeing that we're supposed to be gentlewomen, all we've got to do is to behave according to our instincts."

But Anna-Rose wasn't sure. She doubted their instincts, especially Anna-Felicitas's. She thought her own were better, being older, but even hers were extraordinarily apt to develop in unexpected directions according to the other person's behaviour. Her instinct, for instance, when engaged by Uncle Arthur in conversation had usually been to hit him. Was that tact? Yet she knew she was a gentlewoman. She had heard that, since first she had heard words at all, from every servant, teacher, visitor and relation—except her mother—in her Prussian home. Indeed, over there she had been told she was more than a gentlewoman, for she was a noblewoman and therefore her instincts ought positively to drip tact.

"Mr. Dodson," Aunt Alice had said one afternoon towards the end, when the twins came in from a walk and found the rector having tea, "says that you can't be too tactful in America. He's been there."

"Sensitive—sensitive," said Mr. Dodson, shaking his head at his cup. "Splendidly sensitive, just as they are splendidly whatever else they are. A great country. Everything on a vast scale, including sensitiveness. It has to be met vastly. But quite easy really—-" He raised a pedagogic finger at the twins. "You merely add half as much again to the quantity of your tact as the quantity you encounter of their sensitiveness, and it's all right."

"Be sure you remember that now," said Aunt Alice, pleased.

As Boston got nearer, Anna-Rose, trying to learn Mr. Dodson's recipe for social success by heart, became more silent. On the ship, when the meeting with the Sacks was imminent, she had fled in sudden panic to her cabin to hide from them. That couldn't have been tact. But it was instinct. And she was a gentlewoman. Now once again dread took possession of her and she wanted to hide, not to get there, to stay in the train and go on and on. She said nothing, of course, of her dread to Anna-Felicitas in order not to undermine that young person's morale, but she did very much wish that principles weren't such important things and one needn't have cut oneself off from the protecting figure of Mr. Twist.

"Now remember what Aunt Alice said," she whispered severely to Anna-Felicitas, gripping her arm as they stood jammed in the narrow passage to the door waiting to be let out at Boston.

On the platform, they both thought, would be the Sacks,—certainly one Sack, and they had feverishly made themselves tidy and composed their faces into pleasant smiles preparatory to the meeting. But once again no Sacks were there. The platform emptied itself just as the great hall of the landing-stage had emptied itself, and nobody came to claim the Twinklers.

"These Sacks," remarked Anna-Felicitas patiently at last, when it was finally plain that there weren't any, "don't seem to have acquired the meeting habit."

"No," said Anna-Rose, vexed but relieved. "They're like what Aunt Alice used to complain about the housemaids,—neither punctual nor methodical."

"But it doesn't matter," said Anna-Felicitas. "They shall not escape us. I'm getting quite hungry for the Sacks as a result of not having them. We will now proceed to track them to their lair."

For one instant Anna-Rose looked longingly at the train. It was still there. It was going on further and further away from the Sacks. Happy train. One little jump, and they'd be in it again. But she resisted, and engaged a porter.

Even as soon as this the twins were far less helpless than they had been the day before. The Sack address was in Anna-Rose's hand, and they knew what an American porter looked like. The porter and a taxi were engaged with comparative ease and assurance, and on giving the porter, who had staggered beneath the number of their grips, a dime, and seeing a cloud on his face, they doubled it instantly sooner than have trouble, and trebled it equally quickly on his displaying yet further dissatisfaction, and they departed for the Sacks, their grips piled up round them in the taxi as far as their chins, congratulating themselves on how much easier it was to get away from a train than to get into one.

But the minute their activities were over and they had time to think, silence fell upon them again. They were both nervous. They both composed their faces to indifference to hide that they were nervous, examining the streets they passed through with a calm and blasé stare worthy of a lorgnette. It was the tact part of the coming encounter that was chiefly unnerving Anna-Rose, and Anna-Felicitas was dejected by her conviction that nobody who was a friend of Uncle Arthur's could possibly be agreeable. "By their friends ye shall know them," thought Anna-Felicitas, staring out of the window at the Boston buildings. Also the persistence of the Sacks in not being on piers and railway stations was discouraging. There was no eagerness about this persistence; there wasn't even friendliness. Perhaps they didn't like her and Anna-Rose being German.

This was always the twins' first thought when anybody wasn't particularly cordial. Their experiences in England had made them a little jumpy. They were conscious of this weak spot, and like a hurt finger it seemed always to be getting in the way and being knocked. Anna-Felicitas once more pondered on the inscrutable behaviour of Providence which had led their mother, so safely and admirably English, to leave that blessed shelter and go and marry somebody who wasn't. Of course there was this to be said for it, that she wasn't their mother then. If she had been, Anna-Felicitas felt sure she wouldn't have. Then, perceiving that her thoughts were getting difficult to follow she gave them up, and slid her hand through Anna-Rose's arm and gave it a squeeze.

"Now for the New World, Christopher," she said, pretending to be very eager and brave and like the real Columbus, as the taxi stopped.

---

CHAPTER XIV

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.

"You won't see," he said, pulling it open, "but you can look. If you do see Sacks up there I'm a Hun."

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?"

"Dead? Bless you, no. Anything but dead. The exact opposite. Gone. Left. Got," said the boy.

"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 boy didn't answer this. He was as silent as the other one wasn't; but there was a thrill about him too, something electric and tense. He stared at Anna-Felicitas, then turned quickly and stared at Anna-Rose, then quickly back to Anna-Felicitas, and so on all the way up. He was obviously extraordinarily interested. He seemed to have got hold of an idea that had not struck the squib-like boy downstairs, who was entertaining the taxi-driver with descriptions of the domestic life of the Sacks.

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."

The servant stared uncertainly at them. His mistress had only been gone a few hours, and the flat was still warm with her presence and authority. She wouldn't, he well knew, have permitted co-respondents to be about the place if she had been there, but on the other hand she wasn't there. Mr. Sack was in sole possession now. Nobody knew where Mrs. Sack was. Letters and telegrams lay on the table for her unopened, among them Mr. Twist's announcing the arrival of the Twinklers. In his heart the servant sided with Mr. Sack, but only in his heart, for the servant's wife was the cook, and she, as she frequently explained, was all for strict monogamy. He stared therefore uncertainly at the twins, his brain revolving round their colossal impudence in coming there before Mrs. Sack's rooms had so much as had time to get, as it were, cold.

"We want to see Mr. Clouston Sack," began Anna-Rose in her clear little voice; and no sooner did she begin to speak than a door was pulled open and the gentleman himself appeared.

"I heard a noise of arrival—" he said, stopping suddenly when he saw them. "I heard a noise of arrival, and a woman's voice—"

"It's us," said Anna-Rose, her face covering itself with the bright conciliatory smiles of the arriving guest. "Are you Mr. Clouston Sack?"

She went up to him and held out her hand. They both went up to him and held out their hands.

"We're the Twinklers," said Anna-Rose.

"We've come," said Anna-Felicitas, in case he shouldn't have noticed it.

Mr. Sack let his hand be shaken, and it was a moist hand. He looked like a Gibson young man who has grown elderly. He had the manly profile and shoulders, but they sagged and stooped. There was a dilapidation about him, a look of blurred edges. His hair lay on his forehead in disorder, and his tie had been put on carelessly and had wriggled up to the rim of his collar.

"The Twinklers," he repeated. "The Twinklers. Do I remember, I wonder?"

"There hasn't been much time to forget," said Anna-Felicitas. "It's less than two months since there were all those letters."

"Letters?" echoed Mr. Sack. "Letters?"

"So now we've got here," said Anna-Rose, the more brightly that she was unnerved.

"Yes. We've come," said Anna-Felicitas, also with feverish brightness.

Bewildered, Mr. Sack, who felt that he had had enough to bear the last few hours, stood staring at them. Then he caught sight of the lift-boy, lingering and he further saw the expression on his servant's face Even to his bewilderment it was clear what he was thinking.

Mr. Sack turned round quickly and led the way into the dining-room. "Come in, come in," he said distractedly.

They went in. He shut the door. The lift-boy and the servant lingered a moment making faces at each other; then the lift-boy dropped away in his lift, and the servant retired to the kitchen. "I'm darned," was all he could articulate. "I'm darned."

"There's our luggage," said Anna-Rose, turning to Mr. Sack on getting inside the room, her voice gone a little shrill in her determined cheerfulness. "Can it be brought up?"

"Luggage?" repeated Mr. Sack, putting his hand to his forehead. "Excuse me, but I've got such a racking headache to-day—it makes me stupid—"

"Oh, I'm very sorry," said Anna-Rose solicitously.

"And so am I—very," said Anna-Felicitas, equally solicitous. "Have you tried aspirin? Sometimes some simple remedy like that—"

"Oh thank you—it's good of you, it's good of you. The effect, you see, is that I can't think very clearly. But do tell me—why luggage? Luggage—luggage. You mean, I suppose, baggage."

"Why luggage?" asked Anna-Rose nervously. "Isn't there—isn't there always luggage in America too when people come to stay with one?"

"You've come to stay with me," said Mr. Sack, putting his hand to his forehead again.

"You see," said Anna-Felicitas, "we're the Twinklers."

"Yes, yes—I know. You've told me that."

"So naturally we've come."

"But is it natural?" asked Mr. Sack, looking at them distractedly.

"We sent you a telegram," said Anna-Rose, "or rather one to Mrs. Sack, which is the same thing—"

"It isn't, it isn't," said the distressed Mr. Sack. "I wish it were. It ought to be. Mrs. Sack isn't here—"

"Yes—we're very sorry to have missed her. Did she go to meet us in New York, or where?"

"Mrs. Sack didn't go to meet you. She's—gone."

"Gone where?"

"Oh," cried Mr. Sack, "somewhere else, but not to meet you. Oh," he went on after a moment in which, while the twins gazed at him, he fought with and overcame emotion, "when I heard you speaking in the hall I thought—I had a moment's hope—for a minute I believed—she had come back. So I went out. Else I couldn't have seen you. I'm not fit to see strangers—"

The things Mr. Sack said, and his fluttering, unhappy voice, were so much at variance with the stern lines of his Gibson profile that the twins viewed him with the utmost surprise. They came to no conclusion and passed no judgment because they didn't know but what if one was an American one naturally behaved like that.

"I don't think," said Anna-Felicitas gently, "that you can call us strangers. We're the Twinklers."

"Yes, yes—I know—you keep on telling me that," said Mr. Sack. "But I can't call to mind—"

"Don't you remember all Uncle Arthur's letters about us? We're the nieces he asked you to be kind to for a bit—as I'm sure," Anna-Felicitas added politely, "you're admirably adapted for being."

Mr. Sack turned his bewildered eyes on to her. "Oh, aren't you a pretty girl," he said, in the same distressed voice.

"You mustn't make her vain," said Anna-Rose, trying not to smile all over her face, while Anna-Felicitas remained as manifestly unvain as a person intent on something else would be.

"We know you got Uncle Arthur's letters about us," she continued, "because he showed us your answers back. You invited us to come and stay with you. And, as you perceive, we've done it."

"Then it must have been months ago—months ago," said Mr. Sack, "before all this—do I remember something about it? I've had such trouble since—I've been so distracted one way and another—it may have slipped away out of my memory under the stress—Mrs. Sack—" He paused and looked round the room helplessly. "Mrs. Sack—well, Mrs. Sack isn't here now."

"We're very sorry you've had trouble," said Anna-Felicitas sympathetically. "It's what everybody has, though. Man that is born of woman is full of misery. That's what the Burial Service says, and it ought to know."

Mr. Sack again turned bewildered eyes on to her. "Oh, aren't you a pretty—" he again began.

"When do you think Mrs. Sack will be back?" interrupted Anna-Rose.

"I wish I knew—I wish I could hope—but she's gone for a long while, I'm afraid—"

"Gone not to come back at all, do you mean?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Sack gulped. "I'm afraid that is her intention," he said miserably.

There was a silence, in which they all stood looking at each other.

"Didn't she like you?" then inquired Anna-Felicitas.

Anna-Rose, sure that this wasn't tactful, gave her sleeve a little pull.

"Were you unkind to her?" asked Anna-Felicitas, disregarding the warning.

Mr. Sack, his fingers clasping and unclasping themselves behind his back, started walking up and down the room. Anna-Felicitas, forgetful of what Aunt Alice would have said, sat down on the edge of the table and began to be interested in Mrs. Sack.

"The wives I've seen," she remarked, watching Mr. Sack with friendly and interested eyes, "who were chiefly Aunt Alice—that's Uncle Arthur's wife, the one we're the nieces of—seemed to put up with the utmost contumely from their husbands and yet didn't budge. You must have been something awful to yours."

"I worshipped Mrs. Sack," burst out Mr. Sack. "I worshipped her. I do worship her. She was the handsomest, brightest woman in Boston. I was as proud of her as any man has ever been of his wife."

"Then why did she go?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"I don't think that's the sort of thing you should ask," rebuked Anna-Rose.

"But if I don't ask I won't be told," said Ann Felicitas, "and I'm interested."

"Mrs. Sack went because I was able—I was so constructed—that I could be fond of other people as well as of her," said Mr. Sack.

"Well, that's nothing unusual," said Anna-Felicitas.

"No," said Anna-Rose, "I don't see anything in that."

"I think it shows a humane and friendly spirit," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Besides, it's enjoined in the Bible," said Anna-Rose.

"I'm sure when we meet Mrs. Sack," said Anna-Felicitas very politely indeed, "much as we expect to like her we shall nevertheless continue to like other people as well. You, for instance. Will she mind that?"

"It wasn't so much that I liked other people," said Mr. Sack, walking about and thinking tumultuously aloud rather than addressing anybody, "but that I liked other people so much."

"I see," said Anna-Felicitas, nodding. "You overdid it. Like over-eating whipped cream. Only it wasn't you but Mrs. Sack who got the resulting ache."

"And aren't I aching? Aren't I suffering?"

"Yes, but you did the over-eating," said Anna-Felicitas.

"The world," said the unhappy Mr. Sack, quickening his pace, "is so full of charming and delightful people. Is one to shut one's eyes to them?"

"Of course not," said Anna-Felicitas. "One must love them."

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Sack. "Exactly. That's what I did."

"And though I wouldn't wish," said Anna-Felicitas, "to say anything against somebody who so very nearly was my hostess, yet really, you know, wasn't Mrs. Sack's attitude rather churlish?"

Mr. Sack gazed at her. "Oh, aren't you a pretty—" he began again, with a kind of agonized enthusiasm; but he was again cut short by Anna-Rose, on whom facts of a disturbing nature were beginning to press.

"Aunt Alice," she said, looking and feeling extremely perturbed as the situation slowly grew clear to her, "told us we were never to stay with people whose wives are somewhere else. Unless they have a mother or other female relative living with them. She was most particular about it, and said whatever else we did we weren't ever to do this. So I'm afraid," she continued in her politest voice, determined to behave beautifully under circumstances that were trying, "much as we should have enjoyed staying with you and Mrs. Sack if she had been here to stay with, seeing that she isn't we manifestly can't."

"You can't stay with me," murmured Mr. Sack, turning his bewildered eyes to her. "Were you going to?"

"Of course we were going to. It's what we've come for," said Anna-Felicitas.

"And I'm afraid," said-Anna-Rose, "disappointed as we are, unless you can produce a mother—"

"But where on earth are we to go to, Anna-R.?" inquired Anna-Felicitas, who, being lazy, having got to a place preferred if possible to stay in it, and who besides was sure that in their forlorn situation a Sack in the hand was worth two Sacks not in it, any day. Also she liked the look of Mr. Sack, in spite of his being so obviously out of repair. He badly wanted doing up she said to herself, but on the other hand he seemed to her lovable in his distress, with much of the pathetic helplessness her own dear Irish terrier, left behind in Germany, had had the day he caught his foot in a rabbit trap. He had looked at Anna-Felicitas, while she was trying to get him out of it, with just the same expression on his face that Mr. Sack had on his as he walked about the room twisting and untwisting his fingers behind his back. Only, her Irish terrier hadn't had a Gibson profile. Also, he had looked much more efficient.

"Can't you by any chance produce a mother?" she asked.

Mr. Sack stared at her.

"Of course we're very sorry," said Anna-Rose.

Mr. Sack stared at her.

"But you understand, I'm sure, that under the circumstances—"

"Do you say," said Mr. Sack, stopping still after a few more turns in front of Anna-Rose, and making a great effort to collect his thoughts, "that I—that we—had arranged to look after you?"

"Arranged with Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Rose. "Uncle Arthur Abinger. Of course you had. That's why we're here. Why, you wrote bidding us welcome. He showed us the letter."

"Abinger. Abinger. Oh—that man," said Mr. Sack, his mind clearing.

"We thought you'd probably feel like that about him," said Anna-Felicitas sympathetically.

"Why, then," said Mr. Sack, his mind getting suddenly quite clear, "you must be—why, you are the Twinklers."

"We've been drawing your attention to that at frequent intervals since we got here," said Anna-Felicitas.

"But whether you now remember or still don't realize," said Anna-Rose with great firmness, "I'm afraid we've got to say good-bye."

"That's all very well, Anna-R.," again protested Anna-Felicitas, "but where are we to go to?"

"Go?" said Anna-Rose with a dignity very creditable in one of her size, "Ultimately to California, of course, to Uncle Arthur's other friends. But now, this afternoon, we get back into a train and go to Clark, to Mr. Twist. He at least has a mother."

---

CHAPTER XV

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.

"You can't miss it," encouraged the station-master. "Keep right along after your noses till they knock up against Mrs. Twist's front gate. I'll look after the menagerie—" thus did he describe the Twinkler luggage. "Guess Mrs. Twist'll be sending for it as soon as you get there. Guess she forgot you. Guess she's shaken up by young Mr. Twist's arriving this very day. I wouldn't have forgotten you. No, not for a dozen young Mr. Twists," he added gallantly.

"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."

Freed from their luggage, and for a moment from all care, the twins went up the hill. It was the nicest thing in the world to be going to see their friend again in quite a few minutes. They had, ever since the collapse of the Sack arrangements, been missing him very much. As they hurried on through the scented woods, past quiet fields, between yellow-leaved hedges, the evening sky growing duskier and the beckoning star lighter, they remembered Mr. Twist's extraordinary kindness, his devoted and unfailing care, with the warmest feelings of gratitude and affection. Even Anna-Felicitas felt warm. How often had he rearranged her head when it was hopelessly rolling about; how often had he fed her when she felt better enough to be hungry. Anna-Felicitas was very hungry. She still thought highly of pride and independence, but now considered their proper place was after a good meal. And Anna-Rose, with all the shameless cheerfulness of one who for a little has got rid of her pride and is feeling very much more comfortable in consequence remarked that one mustn't overdo independence.

"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.

Amanda eyed them. "Having supper," she said curtly.

"Fortunate creature," gasped Anna-Felicitas, "I hope he isn't eating it all."

"Will you announce us please?" said Anna-Rose putting on her dignity. "The Miss Twinklers."

"The who?" said Amanda.

"The Miss Twinklers," said Anna-Rose, putting on still more dignity, for there was that in Amanda's manner which roused the Junker in her.

"Can't disturb him at supper," said Amanda briefly.

"I assure you," said Anna-Felicitas, with the earnestness of conviction, "that he'll like it. I think I can undertake to promise he'll show no resentment whatever."

Amanda half shut the door.

"We'll come in please," said Anna-Rose, inserting herself into what was left of the opening. "Will you kindly bear in mind that we're totally unaccustomed to the doorstep?"

Amanda, doubtful, but unpractised in such a situation, permitted herself, in spite of having as she well knew the whole of free and equal America behind her, to be cowed. Well, perhaps not cowed, but taken aback. It was the long words and the awful politeness that did it. She wasn't used to beautiful long words like that, except on Sundays when the clergyman read the prayers in church, and she wasn't used to politeness. That so much of it should come out of objects so young rendered Amanda temporarily dumb.

She wavered with the door. Instantly Anna-Rose slipped through it; instantly Anna-Felicitas followed her.

"Kindly tell your master the Miss Twinklers have arrived," said Anna-Rose, looking every inch a Junker. There weren't many inches of Anna-Rose, but every one of them at that moment, faced by Amanda's want of discipline, was sheer Junker.

Amanda, who had never met a Junker in her happy democratic life, was stirred into bristling emotion by the word master. She was about to fling the insult of it from her by an impetuous and ill-considered assertion that if he was her master she was his mistress and so there now, when the bell which had rung once already since they had been standing parleying rang again and more impatiently, and the dining-room door opened and a head appeared. The twins didn't know that it was Edith's head, but it was.

"Amanda—" began Edith, in the appealing voice that was the nearest she ever dared get to rebuke without Amanda giving notice; but she stopped on seeing what, in the dusk of the hall, looked like a crowd. "Oh—" said Edith, taken aback. "Oh—" And was for withdrawing her head and shutting the door.

But the twins advanced towards her and the stream of light shining behind her and the agreeable smell streaming past her, with outstretched hands.

"How do you do," they both said cordially. "Don't go away again."

Edith, feeling that here was something to protect her quietly feeding mother from, came rather hastily through the door and held it to behind her, while her unresponsive and surprised hand was taken and shaken even as Mr. Sack's had been.

"We've come to see Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose.

"He's our friend," said Anna-Felicitas.

"He's our best friend," said Anna-Rose.

"Is he in there?" asked Anna-Felicitas, appreciatively moving her nose, a particularly delicate instrument, round among the various really heavenly smells that were issuing from the dining-room and sorting them out and guessing what they probably represented, the while water rushed into her mouth.

The sound of a chair being hastily pushed back was heard and Mr. Twist suddenly appeared in the doorway.

"What is it, Edward?" a voice inside said.

Mr. Twist was a pale man, whose skin under no circumstances changed colour except in his ears. These turned red when he was stirred, and they were red now, and seemed translucent with the bright light behind him shining through them.

The twins flew to him. It was wonderful how much pleased they were to see him again. It was as if for years they had been separated from their dearest friend. The few hours since the night before had been enough to turn their friendship and esteem for him into a warm proprietary affection. They felt that Mr. Twist belonged to them. Even Anna-Felicitas felt it, and her eyes as she beheld him were bright with pleasure.

"Oh there you are," cried Anna-Rose darting forward, gladness in her voice, and catching hold of his arm.

"We've come," said Anna-Felicitas, beaming and catching hold of his other arm.

"We got into difficulties," said Anna-Rose.

"We got into them at once," said Anna-Felicitas.

"They weren't our difficulties—"

"They were the Sacks'—"

"But they reacted on us—"

"And so here we are."

"Who is it, Edward?" asked the voice inside.

"Mrs. Sack ran away yesterday from Mr. Sack," went on Anna-Rose eagerly.

"Mr. Sack was still quite warm and moist from it when we got there," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Aunt Alice said we weren't ever to stay in a house where they did that," said Anna-Rose.

"Where there wasn't a lady," said Anna-Felicitas

"So when we saw that she wasn't there because she'd gone, we turned straight round to you," said Anna. Rose.

"Like flowers turning to the sun," said Anna-Felicitas, even in that moment of excitement not without complacency at her own aptness.

"And left our things at the station," Anna-Rose rushed on.

"And ran practically the whole way," said Anna-Felicitas, "because of perhaps being late for supper and you're having eaten it all, and we so dreadfully hungry—"

"Who is it, Edward?" again called the voice inside, louder and more insistently.

Mr. Twist didn't answer. He was quickly turning over the situation in his mind.

He had not mentioned the twins to his mother, which would have been natural, seeing how very few hours he had of reunion with her, if she hadn't happened to have questioned him particularly as to his fellow-passengers on the boat. Her questions had been confined to the first-class passengers, and he had said, truthfully, that he had hardly spoken to one of them, and not at all to any of the women.

Mrs. Twist had been relieved, for she lived in dread of Edward's becoming, as she put it to herself, entangled with ladies. Sin would be bad enough—for Mrs. Twist was obliged reluctantly to know that even with ladies it is possible to sin—but marriage for Edward would be even worse, because it lasted longer. Sin, terrible though it was, had at least this to be said for it, that it could be repented of and done with, and repentance after all was a creditable activity; but there was no repenting of marriage with any credit. It was a holy thing, and you don't repent of holy things,—at least, you oughtn't to. If, as ill-advised young men so often would, Edward wanted as years went on to marry in spite of his already having an affectionate and sympathetic home with feminine society in it, then it seemed to Mrs. Twist most important, most vital to the future comfort of the family, that it should be someone she had chosen herself. She had observed him from infancy, and knew much better than he what was needed for his happiness; and she also knew, if there must be a wife, what was needed for the happiness of his mother and sister. She had not thought to inquire about the second-class passengers, for it never occurred to her that a son of hers could drift out of his natural first-class sphere into the slums of a ship, and Mr. Twist had seen no reason for hurrying the Twinklers into her mental range. Not during those first hours, anyhow. There would be plenty of hours, and he felt that sufficient unto the day would be the Twinklers thereof.

But the part that was really making his ears red was that he had said nothing about the evening with the twins in New York. When his mother asked with the fondness of the occasion what had detained him, he said as many another honest man, pressed by the searching affection of relations, has said before him, that it was business. Now it appeared that he would have to go into the dining-room and say, "No. It wasn't business. It was these."

His ears glowed just to think of it. He hated to lie. Specially he hated to have lied,—at the moment, one plunged in spurred by sudden necessity, and then was left sorrowfully contemplating one's degradation. His own desire was always to be candid; but his mother, he well knew, could not bear the pains candour gave her. She had been so terribly hurt, so grievously wounded when, fresh from praying,—for before he went to Harvard he used to pray—he had on one or two occasions for a few minutes endeavoured not to lie to her that sheer fright at the effect of his unfiliality made him apologize and beg her to forget it and forgive him. Now she was going to be still more wounded by his having lied.

The meticulous tortuousness of family life struck Mr. Twist with a sudden great impatience. After that large life over there in France, to come back to this dreary petticoat lying, this feeling one's way about among tender places ...

"Who is it, Edward?" called the voice inside for the third time.

"There's someone in there seems quite particularly to want to know who we are," said Anna-Felicitas. "Why not tell her?"

"I expect it's your mother," said Anna-Rose, feeling the full satisfaction of having got to a house from which the lady hadn't run anywhere.

"It is," said Mr. Twist briefly.

"Edith!" called the voice, much more peremptorily.

Edith started and half went in, but hesitated and quite stayed out. She was gazing at the Twinklers with the same kind eyes her brother had, but without the disfiguring spectacles. Astonishment and perplexity and anxiety were mixed with the kindness. Amanda also gazed; and if the twins hadn't been so sure of their welcome, even they might gradually have begun to perceive that it wasn't exactly open-armed.

"Edith—Edward—Amanda," called the voice, this time with unmistakable anger.

For one more moment Mr. Twist stood uncertain, looking down at the happy confident faces turned up to him exactly, as Anna-Felicitas had just said, like flowers turning to the sun. Visions of France flashed before him, visions of what he had known, what he had just come back from. His friends over there, the gay courage, the helpfulness, the ready, uninquiring affection, the breadth of outlook, the quick friendliness, the careless assumption that one was decent, that one's intentions were good,—why shouldn't he pull some of the splendid stuff into his poor, lame little home? Why should he let himself drop back from heights like those to the old ridiculous timidities, the miserable habit of avoiding the truth? Rebellion, hope, determination, seized Mr. Twist. His eyes shone behind his spectacles. His ears were two red flags of revolution. He gripped hold of the twins, one under each arm.

"You come right in," he said, louder than he had ever spoken in his life. "Edith, see these girls? They're the two Annas. Their other name is Twinkler, but Anna'll see you through. They want supper, and they want beds, and they want affection, and they're going to get it all. So hustle with the food, and send the Cadillac for their baggage, and fix up things for them as comfortably as you know how. And as for Mrs. Sack," he said, looking first at one twin and then at the other, "if it hadn't been for her running away from her worthless husband—I'm convinced that fellow Sack is worthless—you might never have come here at all. So you see," he finished, laughing at Anna-Rose, "how good comes out of evil."

And with the sound of these words preceding him he pushed open the dining-room door and marched them in.

---

CHAPTER XVI

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.

At first she had felt mere resigned annoyance that Amanda shouldn't have answered the bell, but she didn't wish to cast a shadow over Edward's homecoming by drawing poor Edith's attention before him to how very badly she trained the helps, and therefore she said nothing at the moment; then, when Edith, going in search of Amanda, had opened the door and let in sounds of argument, she was surprised, for she knew no one so intimately that they would be likely to call at such an hour; but when Edward too leapt up, and went out and stayed out and failed to answer her repeated calls, she was first astonished, then indignant, and then suddenly was overcome by a cold foreboding.

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.

Then Edward's voice, raised and defiant—surely defiant?—came through the crack in the door, and every word he said was quite distinct. Anna; supper; affection ... Mrs. Twist sat frozen. And then the door was flung open and Edward tumultuously entered, his ears crimson, his face as she had never seen it and in each hand, held tightly by the arm, a girl.

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.

Mrs. Twist had known Edward, as she sometimes informed Edith, all his life, and had not yet found anything in his morals which was not blameless. Watch him with what loving care she might she had found nothing; and she was sure her mother's instinct would not have failed her. Nevertheless, even with that white past before her—he hadn't told her about "Madame Bovary"—she now instantly believed the worst.

It was the habit of Clark to believe the worst. Clark was very small, and therefore also very virtuous. Each inhabitant was the careful guardian of his neighhour's conduct. Nobody there ever did anything that was wrong; there wasn't a chance. But as Nature insists on a balance, the minds of Clark dwelt curiously on evil. They were minds active in suspicion. They leapt with an instantaneous agility at the worst conclusions. Nothing was ever said in Clark, but everything was thought. The older inhabitants, made fast prisoners in their mould of virtue by age, watched with jealous care the behaviour of those still young enough to attract temptation. The younger ones, brought up in inhibitions, settled down to wakefulness in regard to each other. Everything was provided and encouraged in Clark, a place of pleasant orchards and gentle fields, except the things that had to do with love. Husbands were there; and there was a public library, and social afternoons, and an Emerson society. The husbands died before the wives, being less able to cope with virtue; and a street in Clark of smaller houses into which their widows gravitated had been christened by the stationmaster—a more worldly man because of his three miles off and all the trains—Lamentation Lane.

In this village Mrs. Twist had lived since her marriage, full of dignity and honour. As a wife she had been full of it, for the elder Mr. Twist had been good even when alive, and as a widow she had been still fuller, for the elder Mr. Twist positively improved by being dead. Not a breath had ever touched her and her children. Not the most daring and distrustful Clark mind had ever thought of her except respectfully. And now here was this happening to her; at her age; when she was least able to bear it.

She sat in silence, staring with sombre eyes at the three figures.

"Mother—" began Edward again; but was again interrupted by the twins, who said together, as they had now got into the habit of saying when confronted by silent and surprised Americans, "We've come."

It wasn't that they thought it a particularly good conversational opening, it was because silence and surprise on the part of the other person seemed to call for explanation on theirs, and they were constitutionally desirous of giving all the information in their power.

"How do you do," they then repeated, loosening themselves from Mr. Twist and advancing down the room with outstretched hands.

Mr. Twist came with them. "Mother," he said, "these are the Twinkler girls. Their name's Twinkler. They—-"

Freed as he felt he was from his old bonds, determined as he felt he was on emulating the perfect candour and simplicity of the twins and the perfect candour and simplicity of his comrades in France, his mother's dead want of the smallest reaction to this announcement tripped him up for a moment and prevented his going on.

But nothing ever prevented the twins going on. If they were pleased and excited they went on with cheerful gusto, and if they were unnerved and frightened they still went on,—perhaps even more volubly, anxiously seeking cover behind a multitude of words.

Mrs. Twist had not yet unnerved and frightened them, because they were too much delighted that they had got to her at all. The relief Anna-Rose experienced at having safely piloted that difficult craft, the clumsy if adorable Columbus, into a respectable Port was so immense that it immediately vented itself in words of warmest welcome to the lady in the chair to her own home.

"We're so glad to see you here," she said, smiling till her dimple seemed to be everywhere at once hardly able to refrain from giving the lady a welcome hug instead of just inhospitably shaking her hand. She couldn't even shake her hand, however, because it still held, immovably, the fork. "It would have been too awful," Anna-Rose therefore finished, putting the heartiness of the handshake she wanted to give into her voice instead, "if you had happened to have run away too."

"As Mrs. Sack has done from her husband," Anna-Felicitas explained, smiling too, benevolently, at the black lady who actually having got oyster patties on her plate hadn't bothered to eat them. "But of course you couldn't," she went on, remembering in time to be tactful and make a Sympathetic reference to the lady's weeds; which, indeed, considering Mr. Twist had told her and Anna-Rose that his father had died when he was ten, nearly a quarter of a century ago, seemed to have kept their heads up astonishingly and stayed very fresh. And true to her German training, and undaunted by the fork, she did that which Anna-Rose in her contentment had forgotten, and catching up Mrs. Twist's right hand, fork and all, to her lips gave it the brief ceremonious kiss of a well brought up Junker.

Like Amanda's, Mrs. Twist's life had been up to this empty of Junkers. She had never even heard of them till the war, and pronounced their name, and so did the rest of Clark following her lead, as if it had been junket, only with an r instead of a t at the end. She didn't therefore recognize the action; but even she, outraged as she was, could not but see its grace. And looking up in sombre hostility at the little head bent over her hand and at the dark line of eyelashes on the the flushed face, she thought swiftly, "She's the one."

"You see, mother," said Mr. Twist, pulling a chair vigorously and sitting on it with determination, "it's like this. (Sit down, you two, and get eating. Start on anything you see in this show that hits your fancy. Edith'll be fetching you something hot, I expect—soup, or something—but meanwhile here's enough stuff to go on with.) You see, mother—" he resumed, turning squarely to her, while the twins obeyed him with immense alacrity and sat down and began to eat whatever happened to be nearest them, "these two girls—well, to start with they're twins—-"

Mr. Twist was stopped again by his mother's face. She couldn't conceive why he should lie. Twins the world over matched in size and features; it was notorious that they did. Also, it was the custom for them to match in age, and the tall one of these was at least a year older than the other one. But still, thought Mrs. Twist, let that pass. She would suffer whatever it was she had to suffer in silence.

The twins too were silent, because they were so busy eating. Perfectly at home under the wing they knew so well, they behaved with an easy naturalness that appeared to Mrs. Twist outrageous. But still—let that too pass. These strangers helped themselves and helped each other, as if everything belonged to them; and the tall one actually asked her—her, the mistress of the house—if she could get her anything. Well, let that pass too.

"You see, mother—" began Mr. Twist again.

He was finding it extraordinarily difficult. What a tremendous hold one's early training had on one, he reflected, casting about for words; what a deeply rooted fear there was in one, subconscious, lurking in one's foundations, of one's mother, of her authority, of her quickly wounded affection. Those Jesuits, with their conviction that they could do what they liked with a man if they had had the bringing up of him till he was seven, were pretty near the truth. It took a lot of shaking off, the unquestioning awe, the habit of obedience of one's childhood.

Mr. Twist sat endeavouring to shake it off. He also tried to bolster himself up by thinking he might perhaps be able to assist his mother to come out from her narrowness, and discover too how warm and glorious the sun shone outside, where people loved and helped each other. Then he rejected that as priggish.

"You see, mother," he started again, "I came across them—across these two girls—they're both called Anna, by the way, which seems confusing but isn't really—I came across them on the boat——"

He again stopped dead.

Mrs. Twist had turned her dark eyes to him. They had been fixed on Anna-Felicitas, and on what she was doing with the dish of oyster patties in front of her. What she was doing was not what Mrs. Twist was accustomed to see done at her table. Anna-Felicitas was behaving badly with the patties, and not even attempting to conceal, as the decent do, how terribly they interested her.

"You came across them on the boat," repeated Mrs. Twist, her eyes on her son, moved in spite of her resolution to speech. And he had told her that very afternoon that he had spoken to nobody except men. Another lie. Well, let that pass too ...

Mr. Twist sat staring back at her through his big gleaming spectacles. He well knew the weakness of his position from his mother's point of view; but why should she have such a point of view, such a niggling, narrow one, determined to stay angry and offended because he had been stupid enough to continue, under the influence of her presence, the old system of not being candid with her, of being slavishly anxious to avoid offending? Let her try for once to understand and forgive. Let her for once take the chance offered her of doing a big, kind thing. But as he stared at her it entered his mind that he couldn't very well start moving her heart on behalf of the twins in their presence. He couldn't tell her they were orphans, alone in the world, helpless, poor, and so unfortunately German, with them sitting there. If he did, there would be trouble. The twins seemed absorbed for the moment in getting fed, but he had no doubt their ears were attentive, and at the first suggestion of sympathy being invoked for them they would begin to say a few of those things he was so much afraid his mother mightn't be able to understand. Or, if she understood, appreciate.

He decided that he would be quiet until Edith came back, and then ask his mother to go to the drawing-room with him, and while Edith was looking after the Annas he would, well out of earshot, explain them to his mother, describe their situation, commend them to her patience and her love. He sat silent therefore, wishing extraordinarily hard that Edith would be quick.

But Anna-Felicitas's eyes were upon him now, as well as his mother's. "Is it possible," she asked with her own peculiar gentleness, balancing a piece of patty on her fork, "that you haven't yet mentioned us to your mother?"

And Anna-Rose, struck in her turn at such an omission, paused too with food on the way to her mouth, and said, "And we such friends?"

"Almost, as it were, still red-not from being with you?" said Anna-Felicitas.

Both the twins looked at Mrs. Twist in their surprise.

"I thought the first thing everybody did when they got back to their mother," said Anna-Rose, addressing her, "was to tell her everything from the beginning."

Mrs. Twist, after an instant's astonishment at this unexpected support, bowed her head—it could hardly be called a nod—in her son's direction. "You see—" the movement seemed to say, "even these ..."

"And ever since the first day at sea," said Anna-Felicitas, also addressing Mrs. Twist, "up to as recently as eleven o'clock last night, he has been what I think can be quite accurately described as our faithful two-footed companion."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose. "As much as that we've been friends. Practically inseparable."

"So that it really is very surprising," said Anna-Felicitas to Mr. Twist, "that you didn't tell your mother about us."

Mr. Twist got up. He wouldn't wait for Edith. It was unhealthy in that room.

He took his mother's arm and helped her to get up. "You're very wise, you two," he flung at the twins in the voice of the goaded, "but you may take it from me you don't know everything yet. Mother, come into the drawing-room, and we'll talk. Edith'll see to these girls. I expect I ought to have talked sooner," he went on, as he led her to the door, "but confound it all, I've only been home about a couple of hours."

"Five," said Mrs. Twist.

"Five then. What's five? No time at all."

"Ample," said Mrs Twist; adding icily, "and did I you say confound, Edward?"

"Well, damn then," said Edward very loud, in a rush of rank rebellion.

---

CHAPTER XVII

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.

But before they reached that stage, for the first time in his life he had been saying straight out what he wanted to say to his mother just as if she had been an ordinary human being. He told her all he knew of the twins, asked her to take them in for the present and be good to them, and explained the awkwardness of their position, apart from its tragedy, as Germans by birth stranded in New England, where opinion at that moment was so hostile to Germans. Then, continuing in candour, he had told his mother that here was her chance of doing a fine and beautiful thing, and it was at this point that Mrs. Twist suddenly began, on her side, to talk.

She had listened practically in silence to the rest; had only started when he explained the girls' nationality; but when he came to offering her these girls as the great opportunity of her life to do something really good at last, she, who felt she had been doing nothing else but noble and beautiful things, and doing them with the most single-minded devotion to duty and the most consistent disregard of inclination, could keep silence no longer. Had she not borne her great loss without a murmur? Had she not devoted all her years to bringing up her son to be a good man? Had she ever considered herself? Had she ever flagged in her efforts to set an example of patience in grief, of dignity in misfortune? She began to speak. And just as amazed as she had been at the things this strange, unknown son had been saying to her and at the manner of their delivery, so was he amazed at the things this strange, unknown mother was saying to him, and at the manner of their delivery.

Yet his amazement was not so great after all as hers. Because for years, away down hidden somewhere inside him, he had doubted his mother; for years he had, shocked at himself, covered up and trampled on these unworthy doubts indignantly. He had doubted her unselfishness; he had doubted her sympathy and kindliness; he had even doubted her honesty, her ordinary honesty with money and accounts; and lately, before he went to Europe, he had caught himself thinking she was cruel. Nevertheless this unexpected naked justification of his doubts was shattering to him.

But Mrs. Twist had never doubted Edward. She thought she knew him inside out. She had watched him develop. Watched him during the long years of his unconsciousness. She had been quite secure; and rather disposed, also somewhere down inside her, to a contempt for him, so easy had he been to manage, so ready to do everything she wished. Now it appeared that she no more knew Edward than if he had been a stranger in the street.

The bursting of the dykes of convention between them was a horrible thing to them both. Mr. Twist had none of the cruelty of the younger generation to support him: he couldn't shrug his shoulder and take comfort in the thought that this break between them was entirely his mother's fault, for however much he believed it to be her fault the belief merely made him wretched; he had none of the pitiless black pleasure to be got from telling himself it served her right. So naturally kind was he—weak, soft, stupid, his mother shook out at him—that through all his own shame at this naked vision of what had been carefully dressed up for years in dignified clothes of wisdom and affection, he was actually glad, when he had time in his room to think it over, glad she should be so passionately positive that he, and only he, was in the wrong. It would save her from humiliation; and of the painful things of late Mr. Twist could least bear to see a human being humiliated.

That was, however, towards morning. For hours raged, striding about his room, sorting out the fragments into which his life as a son had fallen, trying to fit them into some sort of a pattern, to see clear about the future. Clearer. Not clear. He couldn't hope for that yet. The future seemed one confused lump. All he could see really clear of it was that he was going, next day, and taking the twins. He would take them to the other people they had a letter to, the people in California, and then turn his face back to Europe, to the real thing, to the greatness of life where death is. Not an hour longer than he could help would he or they stay in that house. He had told his mother he would go away, and she had said, "I hope never to see you again." Who would have thought she had so much of passion in her? Who would have thought he had so much of it in him?

Fury against her injustice shook and shattered Mr. Twist. Not so could fair and affectionate living together be conducted, on that basis of suspicion, distrust, jealousy. Through his instinct, though not through his brain, shot the conviction that his mother was jealous of the twins,—jealous of the youth of the twins, and of their prettiness, and goodness, and of the power, unknown to them, that these things gave them. His brain was impervious to such a conviction, because it was an innocent brain, and the idea would never have entered it that a woman of his mother's age, well over sixty, could be jealous in that way; but his instinct knew it.

The last thing his mother said as he left the drawing-room was, "You have killed me. You have killed your own mother. And just because of those girls."

And Mr. Twist, shocked at this parting shot of unfairness, could find, search as he might, nothing to be said for his mother's point of view. It simply wasn't true. It simply was delusion.

Nor could she find anything to be said for his, but then she didn't try to, it was so manifestly unforgivable. All she could do, faced by this bitter sorrow, was to leave Edward to God. Sternly, as he flung out of the room at last, unsoftened, untouchable, deaf to her even when she used the tone he had always obeyed the tone of authority, she said to herself she must leave her son to God. God knew. God would judge. And Clark too would know; and Clark too would judge.

Left alone in the drawing-room on this terrible night of her second great bereavement, Mrs. Twist was yet able, she was thankful to feel, to resolve she would try to protect her son as long as she could from Clark. From God she could not, if she would, protect him; but she would try to protect him even now, as she had always protected him, from earthly harm and hurt. Clark would, however, surely know in time, protect as she might, and judge between her and Edward. God knew already, and was already judging. God and Clark.... Poor Edward.

---

CHAPTER XVIII

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.

She was longer away this time, and the twins having eaten, among other things, a great many meringues, grew weary of sitting with those they hadn't eaten lying on the dish in front of them reminding them of those they had. They wanted, having done with meringues, to get away from them and forget them. They wanted to go into another room now, where there weren't any. Anna-Felicitas felt, and told Anna-Rose who was staring listlessly at the left-over meringues, that it was like having committed murder, and being obliged to go on looking at the body long after you were thoroughly tired of it. Anna-Rose agreed, and said that she wished now she hadn't committed meringues,—anyhow so many of them.

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.

Edith said nothing, but continued quickly up the stairs.

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.

Edith, like her brother, was born to be a mother,—one of the satisfactory sort that keeps you warm and doesn't argue with you. Germans or no Germans the Twinklers were the cutest little things, thought Edith; and she kissed them, with the same hunger with which, being now thirty-eight, she was beginning to kiss puppies.

"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.

He frowned. He didn't look at them, he frowned at his own teapot. He had made up his mind to be very short with the Annas until they were safely out of the house, and not permit himself to be entangled by them in controversy. Also, he didn't want to look at them if he could help it. He was afraid that if he did he might be unable not to take them both in his arms and beg their pardon for the whole horridness of the world.

But if he didn't look at them, they looked at him. Four round, blankly surprised eyes were fixed, he knew, unblinkingly on him.

"We're seeing you in quite a new light," said Anna-Rose at last, troubled and upset.

"Maybe," said Mr. Twist, frowning at his teapot.

"Perhaps you will be so good," said Anna-Felicitas stiffly, for at all times she hated being stirred up and uprooted, "as to tell us where you think we're going to."

"Because," said Anna-Rose, her voice trembling a little, not only at the thought of fresh responsibilities, but also with a sense of outraged faith, "our choice of residence, as you may have observed, is strictly limited."

Mr. Twist, who had spent an hour before breakfast with Edith, whose eyes were red, informed them that they were en route for California.

"To those other people," said Anna-Rose. "I see."

She held her head up straight.

"Well, I expect they'll be very glad to see us," she said after a silence; and proceeded, her chin in the air, to look down her nose, because she didn't want Mr. Twist, or Edith or Anna-Felicitas, to notice that her eyes had gone and got tears in them. She angrily wished she hadn't got such damp eyes. They were no better than swamps, she thought—undrained swamps; and directly fate's foot came down a little harder than usual, up oozed the lamentable liquid. Not thus should the leader of an expedition behave. Not thus, she was sure, did the original Christopher. She pulled herself together; and after a minute's struggle was able to leave off looking down her nose.

But meanwhile Anna-Felicitas had informed Mr. Twist with gentle dignity that he was obviously tired of them.

"Not at all," said Mr. Twist.

Anna-Felicitas persisted. "In view of the facts," she said gently, "I'm afraid your denial carries no weight."

"The facts," said Mr. Twist, taking up his teapot and examining it with care, "are that I'm coming with you."

"Oh are you," said Anna-Felicitas much more briskly; and it was here that Anna-Rose's eyes dried up.

"That rather dishes your theory," said Mr. Twist, still turning his teapot about in his hands. "Or would if it didn't happen that I—well, I happen to have some business to do in California, and I may as well do it now as later. Still, I could have gone by a different route or train, so you see your theory is rather dished, isn't it?"

"A little," admitted Anna-Felicitas. "Not altogether. Because if you really like our being here, here we are. So why hurry us off somewhere else so soon?"

Mr. Twist perceived that he was being led into controversy in spite of his determination not to be. "You're very wise," he said shortly, "but you don't know everything. Let us avoid conjecture and stick to facts. I'm going to take you to California, and hand you over to your friends. That's all you know, and all you need to know."

"As Keats very nearly said," said Anna-Rose

"And if our friends have run away?" suggested Anna-Felicitas.

"Oh Lord," exclaimed Mr. Twist impatiently, putting the teapot down with a bang, "do you think we're running away all the time in America?"

"Well, I think you seem a little restless," said Anna-Felicitas.

Thus it was that two hours later the twins found themselves at the Clark station once more, once more starting into the unknown, just as if they had never done it before, and gradually, as they adapted themselves to the sudden change, such is the india-rubber-like quality of youth, almost with the same hopefulness. Yet they couldn't but meditate, left alone on the platform while Mr. Twist checked the baggage, on the mutability of life. They seemed to live in a kaleidoscope since the war began what a series of upheavals and readjustments had been theirs! Silent, and a little apart on the Clark platform, they reflected retrospectively; and as they counted up their various starts since the days, only fourteen months ago, when they were still in their home in Germany, apparently as safely rooted, as unshakably settled as the pine trees in their own forests, they couldn't but wonder at the elusiveness of the unknown, how it wouldn't let itself be caught up with and at the trouble it was giving them.

They had had so many changes in the last year that they did want now to have time to become familiar with some one place and people. Already however, being seventeen, they were telling themselves, and each other that after all, since the Sacks had failed them, California was their real objective. Not Clark at all. Clark had never been part of their plans. Uncle Arthur and Aunt Alice didn't even know it existed. It was a side-show; just a little thing of their own, an extra excursion slipped in between the Sacks and the Delloggs. True they had hoped to stay there some time, perhaps even for months,—anyhow, time to mend their stockings in, which were giving way at the toes unexpectedly, seeing how new they were; but ultimately California was the place they had to go to. It was only that it was a little upsetting to be whisked out of Clark at a moment's notice.

"I expect you'll explain everything to us when we're in the train and have lots of time," Anna-Rose had said to Mr. Twist as the car moved away from the house and Edith, red-eyed, waved her handkerchief from the doorstep.

Mrs. Twist had not come down to say good-bye, and they had sent her many messages.

"I expect I will," Mr. Twist had answered.

But it was not till they were the other side of Chicago that he really began to be himself again. Up to then—all that first day, and the next morning in New York where he took them to the bank their £200 was in and saw that they got a cheque-book, and all the day after that waiting in the Chicago hotel for the train they were to go on in to California—Mr. Twist was taciturn.

They left Chicago in the evening; a raw, wintery October evening with cold rain in the air, and the twins, going early to bed in their compartment, a place that seemed to them so enchanting that their spirits couldn't fail to rise, saw no more of him till breakfast next morning. They then noticed that the cloud had lifted a little; and as the day went on it lifted still more. They were going to be three days together in that train, and it would be impossible for Mr. Twist, they were sure, to go on being taciturn as long as that. It wasn't his nature. His nature was conversational. And besides, shut up like that in a train, the sheer getting tired of reading all day would make him want to talk.

So after lunch, when they were all three on the platform of the observation car, though there was nothing to observe except limitless flat stretches of bleak and empty country, the twins suggested that he should now begin to talk again. They pointed out that his body was bound to get stiff on that long journey from want of exercise, but that his mind needn't, and he had better stretch it by conversing agreeably with them as he used to before the day, which seemed so curiously long ago, when they landed in America.

"It does indeed seem long ago," agreed Mr. Twist, lighting another cigarette. "I have difficulty in realizing it isn't a week yet."

And he reflected that the Annas had managed to produce pretty serious havoc in America considering they had only been in it five days. He and his mother permanently estranged; Edith left alone at Clark sitting there in the ruins of her loving preparations for his return, with nothing at all that he could see to look forward to and live for except the hourly fulfilment of what she regarded as duty; every plan upset; the lives, indeed, of his mother and of his sister and of himself completely altered,—it was a pretty big bag in the time, he thought, flinging the match back towards Chicago.

Mr. Twist felt sore. He felt like somebody who had had a bad tumble, and is sore and a little dizzy; but he recognized that these great ruptures cannot take place without aches and doubts. He ached, and he doubted and he also knew through his aches and doubts that he was free at last from what of late years he had so grievously writhed under—the shame of pretence. And the immediate cause of his being set free was, precisely, the Annas.

It had been a violent, a painful setting free, but it had happened; and who knew if, without their sudden appearance at Clark and the immediate effect they produced on his mother, he wouldn't have lapsed after all, in spite of the feelings and determinations he had brought back with him from Europe, into the old ways again under the old influence, and gone on ignobly pretending to agree, to approve, to enjoy, to love, when he was never for an instant doing anything of the sort? He might have trailed on like that for years—Mr. Twist didn't like the picture of his own weakness, but he was determined to look at himself as he was—trailed along languidly when he was at home, living another life when he was away, getting what he absolutely must have, the irreducible minimum of personal freedom necessary to sanity, by means of small and shabby deceits. My goodness, how he hated deceits, how tired he was of the littleness of them!

He turned his head and looked at the profiles of the Annas sitting alongside him. His heart suddenly grew warm within him. They had on the blue caps again which made them look so bald and cherubic, and their eyes were fixed on the straight narrowing lines of rails that went back and back to a point in the distance. The dear little things; the dear, dear little things,—so straightforward, so blessedly straight and simple, thought Mr. Twist. Fancy his mother losing a chance like this. Fancy anybody, thought the affectionate and kind man, missing an opportunity of helping such unfortunately placed children.

The twins felt he was looking at them, and together they turned and looked at him. When they saw his expression they knew the cloud had lifted still more, and their faces broke into broad smiles of welcome.

"It's pleasant to see you back again," said Anna-Felicitas heartily, who was next to him.

"We've missed you very much," said Anna-Rose.

"It hasn't been like the same place, the world hasn't," said Anna-Felicitas, "since you've been away."

"Since you walked out of the dining-room that night at Clark," said Anna-Rose.

"Of course we know you can't always be with us," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Which we deeply regret," interjected Anna-Rose.

"But while you are with us," said Anna-Felicitas, "for these last few days, I would suggest that we should be happy. As happy as we used to be on the St. Luke when we weren't being sea-sick." And she thought she might even go so far as to enjoy hearing the "Ode to Dooty," now.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, leaning forward. "In three days we shall have disappeared into the maw of the Delloggs. Do let us be happy while we can. Who knows what their maw will be like? But whatever it's like," she added firmly, "we're going to stick in it."

"And perhaps," said Anna-Felicitas, "now that you're a little restored to your normal condition, you'll tell us what has been the matter."

"For it's quite clear," said Anna-Rose, "that something has been the matter."

"We've been talking it over," said Anna-Felicitas, "and putting two and two together, and perhaps you'll tell us what it was, and then we shall know if we're right."

"Perhaps I will," said Mr. Twist, cogitating, as he continued benevolently to gaze at them. "Let's see—" He hesitated, and pushed his hat off his forehead. "I wonder if you'd understand—"

"We'll give our minds to it," Anna-Felicitas assured him.

"These caps make us look more stupid than we are," Anna-Rose assured him, deducing her own appearance from that of Anna-Felicitas.

Encouraged, but doubtful of their capabilities of comprehension on this particular point, Mr. Twist embarked rather gingerly on his explanations. He was going to be candid from now on for the rest of his days, but the preliminary plunges were, he found, after all a little difficult. Even with the pellucidly candid Annas, all ready with ears pricked up attentively and benevolently and minds impartial, he found it difficult. It was because, on the subject of mothers, he feared he was up against their one prejudice. He felt rather than knew that their attitude on this one point might be uncompromising,—mothers were mothers, and there was an end of it; that sort of attitude, coupled with extreme reprobation of himself for supposing anything else.

He was surprised and relieved to find he was wrong. Directly they got wind of the line his explanations were taking, which was very soon for they were giving their minds to it as they promised and Mr. Twist's hesitations were illuminating, they interrupted.

"So we were right," they said to each other.

"But you don't know yet what I'm going to say," said Mr. Twist. "I've only started on the preliminaries."

"Yes we do. You fell out with your mother," said Anna-Rose.

"Quarrelled," said Anna-Felicitas, nodding

"We didn't think so at the time," said Anna-Rose.

"We just felt there was an atmosphere of strain about Clark," said Anna-Felicitas.

"But talking it over privately, we concluded that was what had happened."

Mr. Twist was so much surprised that for a moment he could only say "Oh." Then he said, "And you're terribly shocked, I suppose."

"Oh no," they said airily and together.

"No?"

"You see—" began Anna-Felicitas.

"You see—" began Anna-Rose.

"You see, as a general principle," said Anna-Felicitas, "it's reprehensible to quarrel with one's mother."

"But we've not been able to escape observing—" said Anna-Rose.

"In the course of our brief and inglorious career," put in Anna-Felicitas.

"—that there are mothers and mothers," said Anna-Rose.

"Yes," said Mr. Twist; and as they didn't go on he presently added, "Yes?"

"Oh, that's all," said the twins, once more airily and together.

---

CHAPTER XIX

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.

Mr. Twist had never been further west than Chicago and break up or no break up of his home he couldn't but have a pleasant feeling of adventure. Every now and then the realization of this feeling gave his conscience a twinge, and wrung out of it a rebuke. He was having the best of it in this business; he was the party in the quarrel who went away, who left the dreariness of the scene of battle with all its corpses of dead illusions, and got off to fresh places and people who had never heard of him. Just being in a train, he found, and rushing on to somewhere else was extraordinarily nerve-soothing. At Clark there would be gloom and stagnation, the heavy brooding of a storm that has burst but not moved on, a continued anger on his mother's side, naturally increasing with her inactivity, with her impotence. He was gone, and she could say and do nothing more to him. In a quarrel, thought Mr. Twist, the morning he pushed up his blinds and saw the desert at sunrise, an exquisite soft thing just being touched into faint colours,—in a quarrel the one who goes has quite unfairly the best of it. Beautiful new places come and laugh at him, people who don't know him and haven't yet judged and condemned him are ready to be friendly. He must, of course, go far enough; not stay near at hand in some familiar place and be so lonely that he ends by being remorseful. Well, he was going far enough. Thanks to the Annas he was going about as far as he could go. Certainly he was having the best of it in being the one in the quarrel who went; and he was shocked to find himself cynically thinking, on top of that, that one should always, then, take care to be the one who did go.

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.

By that route, the Santa Fé, it is not till two or three hours before you get to the end of the journey that summer meets you. It is waiting for you at a place called San Bernardino. There is no trace of it before. Up to then you are still in October; and then you get to the top of the pass, and with a burst it is June,—brilliant, windless, orange-scented.

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.

From that point on to the end of the line in Los Angeles the twins could only conclude they were in heaven. It was the light that did it, the extraordinary glow of radiance. Of course there were orchards after orchards of orange trees covered with fruit, white houses smothered in flowers, gardens overrun with roses, tall groups of eucalyptus trees giving an impression of elegant nakedness, long lines of pepper trees with frail fern-like branches, and these things continued for the rest of the way; but they would have been as nothing without that beautiful, great bland light. The twins had had their hot summers in Pomerania, and their July days in England, but had not yet seen anything like this. Here was summer without sultriness, without gnats, mosquitoes, threatening thunderstorms, or anything to spoil it; it was summer as it might be in the Elysian fields, perfectly clear, and calm, and radiant. When the train stopped they could see how not a breath of wind stirred the dust on the quiet white roads, and the leaves of the magnolia trees glistened motionless in the sun. The train went slowly and stopped often, for there seemed to be one long succession of gardens and villages. After the empty, wind-driven plains they had come through, those vast cold expanses without a house or living creature in sight, what a laughing plenty, what a gracious fruitfulness, was here. And when they went back to their compartment it too was full of summer smells,—the smell of fruit, and roses, and honey.

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.

As for Mr. Twist, he was even more entranced than the twins as he gazed out of the window, for being older he had had time to see more ugly things, had got more used to them and to taking them as principally making up life. He stared at what he saw, and thought with wonder of his mother's drawing-room at Clark, of its gloomy, velvet-upholstered discomforts, of the cold mist creeping round the house, and of that last scene in it, with her black figure in the middle of it, tall and thin and shaking with bitterness. He had certainly been in that drawing-room and heard her so terribly denouncing him, but it was very difficult to believe; it seemed so exactly like a nightmare, and this the happy normal waking up in the morning.

They all three were in the highest spirits when they got out at Los Angeles and drove across to the Southern Pacific station—the name alone made their hearts leap—to catch the afternoon train on to where the Delloggs lived, and their spirits were the kind one can imagine in released souls on their first arriving in paradise,—high, yet subdued; happy, but reverential; a sort of rollicking awe. They were subdued, in fact, by beauty. And the journey along the edge of the Pacific to Acapulco, where the Delloggs lived, encouraged and developed this kind of spirits, for the sun began to set, and, as the train ran for miles close to the water with nothing but a strip of sand between it and the surf, they saw their first Pacific sunset. It happened to be even in that land of wonderful sunsets an unusually wonderful one, and none of the three had ever seen anything in the least like it. They could but sit silent and stare. The great sea, that little line of lovely islands flung down on it like a chain of amethysts, that vast flame of sky, that heaving water passionately reflecting it, and on the other side, through the other windows, a sharp wall of black mountains,—it was fantastically beautiful, like something in a poem or a dream.

By the time they got to Acapulco it was dark. Night followed upon the sunset with a suddenness that astonished the twins, used to the leisurely methods of twilight on the Baltic; and the only light in the country outside the town as they got near it was the light from myriads of great stars.

No Delloggs were at the station, but the twins were used now to not being met and had not particularly expected them; besides, Mr. Twist was with them this time, and he would see that if the Delloggs didn't come to them they would get safely to the Delloggs.

The usual telegram had been sent announcing their arrival, and the taxi-driver, who seemed to know the Dellogg house well when Mr. Twist told him where they wanted to go, apparently also thought it natural they should want to go exactly there. In him, indeed, there did seem to be a trace of expecting them,—almost as if he had been told to look out for them; for hardly had Mr. Twist begun to give him the address than glancing at the twins he said, "I guess you're wanting Mrs. Dellogg"; and got down and actually opened the door for them, an attention so unusual in the taxi-drivers the twins had up to then met in America that they were more than ever convinced that nothing in the way of unfriendliness or unkindness could stand up against sun and oranges.

"Relations?" he asked them through the window as he shut the door gently and carefully, while Mr. Twist went with a porter to see about the luggage.

"I beg your pardon?" said Anna-Rose.

"Relations of Delloggses?"

"No," said Anna-Rose. "Friends."

"At least," amended Anna-Felicitas, "practically."

"Ah," said the driver, leaning with both his arms on the window-sill in the friendliest possible manner, and chewing gum and eyeing them with thoughtful interest.

Then he said, after a pause during which his jaw rolled regularly from side to side and the twins watched the rolling with an interest equal to his interest in them, "From Los Angeles?"

"No," said Anna-Rose. "From New York."

"At least," amended Anna-Felicitas, "practically."

"Well I call that a real compliment," said the driver slowly and deliberately because of his jaw going on rolling. "To come all that way, and without being relations—I call that a real compliment, and a friendship that's worth something. Anybody can come along from Los Angeles, but it takes a real friend to come from New York," and he eyed them now with admiration.

The twins for their part eyed him. Not only did his rolling jaws fascinate them, but the things he was saying seemed to them quaint.

"But we wanted to come," said Anna-Rose, after a pause.

"Of course. Does you credit," said the driver.

The twins thought this over.

The bright station lights shone on their faces, which stood out very white in the black setting of their best mourning. Before getting to Los Angeles they had dressed themselves carefully in what Anna-Felicitas called their favourable-impression-on-arrival garments,—those garments Aunt Alice had bought for them on their mother's death, expressing the wave of sympathy in which she found herself momentarily engulfed by going to a very good and expensive dressmaker; and in the black perfection of these clothes the twins looked like two well-got-up and very attractive young crows. These were the clothes they had put on on leaving the ship, and had been so obviously admired in, to the uneasiness of Mr. Twist, by the public; it was in these clothes that they had arrived within range of Mr. Sack's distracted but still appreciative vision, and in them that they later roused the suspicions and dislike of Mrs. Twist. It was in these clothes that they were now about to start what they hoped would be a lasting friendship with the Delloggs, and remembering they had them on they decided that perhaps it wasn't only sun and oranges making the taxi-driver so attentive, but also the effect on him of their grown-up and awe-inspiring hats.

This was confirmed by what he said next. "I guess you're old friends, then," he remarked, after a period of reflective jaw-rolling. "Must be, to come all that way."

"Well—not exactly," said Anna-Rose, divided between her respect for truth and her gratification at being thought old enough to be somebody's old friend.

"You see," explained Anna-Felicitas, who was never divided in her respect for truth, "we're not particularly old anything."

The driver in his turn thought this over, and finding he had no observations he wished to make on it he let it pass, and said, "You'll miss Mr. Dellogg."

"Oh?" said Anna-Rose, pricking up her ears, "Shall we?"

"We don't mind missing Mr. Dellogg," said Anna-Felicitas. "It's Mrs. Dellogg we wouldn't like to miss."

The driver looked puzzled.

"Yes—that would be too awful," said Anna-Rose, who didn't want a repetition of the Sack dilemma. "You did say," she asked anxiously, "didn't you, that we were going to miss Mr. Dellogg?"

The driver, looking first at one of them and then at the other, said, "Well, and who wouldn't?"

And this answer seemed so odd to the twins that they could only as they stared at him suppose it was some recondite form of American slang, provided with its own particular repartee which, being unacquainted with the language, they were not in a position to supply. Perhaps, they thought, it was of the same order of mysterious idioms as in England such sentences as I don't think, and Not half,—forms of speech whose exact meaning and proper use had never been mastered by them.

"There won't be another like Mr. Dellogg in these parts for many a year," said the driver, shaking his head. "Ah no. And that's so."

"Isn't he coming back?" asked Anna-Rose.

The driver's jaws ceased for a moment to roll. He stared at Anna-Rose with unblinking eyes. Then he turned his head away and spat along the station, and then, again fixing his eyes on Anna-Rose, he said, "Young gurl, you may be a spiritualist, and a table-turner, and a psychic-rummager, and a ghost-fancier, and anything else you please, and get what comfort you can out of your coming backs and the rest of the blessed truck, but I know better. And what I know, being a Christian, is that once a man's dead he's either in heaven or he's in hell, and whichever it is he's in, in it he stops."

Anna-Felicitas was the first to speak. "Are we to understand," she inquired, "that Mr. Dellogg—" She broke off.

"That Mr. Dellogg is—" Anna-Rose continued for her, but broke off too.

"That Mr. Dellogg isn't—" resumed Anna-Felicitas with determination, "well, that he isn't alive?"

"Alive?" repeated the driver. He let his hand drop heavily on the window-sill. "If that don't beat all," he said, staring at her. "What do you come his funeral for, then?"

"His funeral?"

"Yes, if you don't know that he ain't?"

"Ain't—isn't what?"

"Alive, of course. No, I mean dead. You're getting me all tangled up."

"But we haven't."

"But we didn't."

"We had a letter from him only last month."

"At least, an uncle we've got had."

"And he didn't say a word in it about being dead—I mean, there was no sign of his being going to be—I mean, he wasn't a bit ill or anything in his letter—"

"Now see here," interrupted the driver, sarcasm in his voice, "it ain't exactly usual is it—I put it to you squarely, and say it ain't exactly usual (there may be exceptions, but it ain't exactly usual) to come to a gentleman's funeral, and especially not all the way from New York, without some sort of an idea that he's dead. Some sort of a general idea, anyhow," he added still more sarcastically; for his admiration for the twins had given way to doubt and discomfort, and a suspicion was growing on him that with incredible and horrible levity, seeing what the moment was and what the occasion, they were filling up the time waiting for their baggage, among which were no doubt funeral wreaths, by making game of him.

"Gurls like you shouldn't behave that way," he went on, his voice aggrieved as he remembered how sympathetically he had got down from his seat when he saw their mourning clothes and tired white faces and helped them into his taxi,—only for genuine mourners, real sorry ones, going to pay their last respects to a gentleman like Mr. Dellogg, would he, a free American have done that. "Nicely dressed gurls, well-cared for gurls. Daughters of decent people. Here you come all this way, I guess sent by your parents to represent them properly, and properly fitted out in nice black clothes and all, and you start making fun. Pretending. Playing kind of hide-and-seek with me about the funeral. Messing me up in a lot of words. I don't like it. I'm a father myself, and I don't like it. I don't like to see daughters going on like this when their father ain't looking. It don't seem decent to me. But I suppose you Easterners—"

The twins, however, were not listening. They were looking at each other in dismay. How extraordinary, how terrible, the way Uncle Arthur's friends gave out. They seemed to melt away at one's mere approach. People who had been living with their husbands all their lives ran away just as the twins came on the scene; people who had been alive all their lives went and died, also at that very moment. It almost seemed as if directly anybody knew that they, the Twinklers, were coming to stay with them they became bent on escape. They could only look at each other in stricken astonishment at this latest blow of Fate. They heard no more of what the driver said. They could only sit and look at each other.

And then Mr. Twist came hurrying across from the baggage office, wiping his forehead, for the night was hot. Behind him came the porter, ruefully balancing the piled-up grips on his truck.

"I'm sorry to have been so—" began Mr. Twist, smiling cheerfully: but he stopped short in his sentence and left off smiling when he saw the expression in the four eyes fixed on him. "What has happened?" he asked quickly.

"Only what we might have expected," said Anna-Rose.

"Mr. Dellogg's dead," said Anna-Felicitas.

"You don't say," said Mr. Twist; and after a pause he said again, "You don't say."

Then he recovered himself. "I'm very sorry to hear it, of course," he said briskly, picking himself up, as it were, from this sudden and unexpected tumble, "but I don't see that it matters to you so long as Mrs. Dellogg isn't dead too."

"Yes, but—" began Anna-Rose.

"Mr. Dellogg isn't very dead, you see," said Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist looked from them to the driver, but finding no elucidation there and only disapproval, looked back again.

"He isn't dead and settled down," said Anna-Rose.

"Not that sort of being dead," said Anna-Felicitas. "He's just dead."

"Just got to the stage when he has a funeral," said Anna-Rose.

"His funeral, it seems, is imminent," said Anna-Felicitas. "Did you not give us to understand," she asked, turning to the driver, "that it was imminent?"

"I don't know about imminent," said the driver, who wasn't going to waste valuable time with words like that, "but it's to-morrow."

"And you see what that means for us," said Anna-Felicitas, turning to Mr. Twist.

Mr. Twist did.

He again wiped his forehead, but not this time because the night was hot.

---

CHAPTER XX

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?

Mr. Twist, being of the artistic temperament for otherwise he wouldn't have been so sympathetic nor would he have minded, as he so passionately did mind, his Uncle Charles's teapot dribbling on to the tablecloth—was sometimes swept by brief but tempestuous revulsions of feeling, and though he loved the Twinklers he did at this moment describe them mentally and without knowing it in the very words of Uncle Arthur, as those accursed twins. It was quite unjust, he knew. They couldn't help the death of the man Dellogg. They were the victims, from first to last, of a cruel and pursuing fate; but it is natural to turn on victims, and Mr. Twist was for an instant, out of the very depth of his helpless sympathy, impatient 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, it will be seen, was frankly unreasonable, but then he was very much taken aback and annoyed. What was he to do with the Annas? He was obviously not a relation of theirs—and indeed no profiles could have been less alike—and he didn't suppose Acapulco was behind other parts of America in curiosity and gossip. If he stayed on at the Cosmopolitan with the twins till Mrs. Dellogg was approachable again, whenever that might be, every sort of question would be being asked in whispers about who they were and what was their relationship, and presently whenever they sat down anywhere the chairs all round them would empty. Mr. Twist had seen the kind of thing happening in hotels before to other people,—never to himself; never had he been in any situation till now that was not luminously regular. And quite soon after this with the chairs had begun to happen, the people who created these vacancies were told by the manager—firmly in America, politely in England, and sympathetically in France—that their rooms had been engaged a long time ago for the very next day, and no others were available.

The Cosmopolitan was clearly an hotel frequented by the virtuous rich. Mr. Twist felt that he and the Annas wouldn't, in their eyes, come under this heading, not, that is, when the other guests became aware of the entire absence of any relationship between him and the twins. Well, for a day or two nothing could happen; for a day or two, before his party had had time to sink into the hotel consciousness and the manager appeared to tell him the rooms were engaged, he could think things out and talk them over with his companions. Perhaps he might even see Mrs. Dellogg. The funeral, he had heard on inquiring of the hall porter was next day. It was to be a brilliant affair, said the porter. Mr. Dellogg had been a prominent inhabitant, free with his money, a supporter of anything there was to support. The porter talked of him as the taxi-driver had done, regretfully and respectfully; and Mr. Twist went to bed angrier than ever with a man who, being so valuable and so necessary, should have neglected at such a moment to go on living.

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.

His reflections were many and various, and they conflicted with and contradicted each other as the reflections of persons in a difficult position who have Mr. Twist's sort of temperament often do. Faced by a dribbling teapot, an object which touched none of the softer emotions, Mr. Twist soared undisturbed in the calm heights of a detached and concentrated intelligence, and quickly knew what to do with it; faced by the derelict Annas his heart and his tenderness got in the ways of any clear vision.

About three o'clock in the morning, when his mind was choked and strewn with much pulled-about and finally discarded plans, he suddenly had an idea. A real one. As far as he could see, a real good one. He would place the Annas in a school.

Why shouldn't they go to school? he asked himself, starting off answering any possible objections. A year at a first-rate school would give them and everybody else time to consider. They ought never to have left school. It was the very place for luxuriant and overflowing natures like theirs. No doubt Acapulco had such a thing as a finishing school for young ladies in it, and into it the Annas should go, and once in it there they should stay put, thought Mr. Twist in vigorous American, gathering up his mouth defiantly.

Down these lines of thought his relieved mind cantered easily. He would seek out a lawyer the next morning, regularize his position to the twins by turning himself into their guardian, and then get them at once into the best school there was. As their guardian he could then pay all their expenses, and faced by this legal fact they would, he hoped, be soon persuaded of the propriety of his paying whatever there was to pay.

Mr. Twist was so much pleased by his idea that he was able to go to sleep after that. Even three months' school—the period he gave Mrs. Dellogg for her acutest grief—would do. Tide them over. Give them room to turn round in. It was a great solution. He took off his spectacles, snuggled down into his rosy nest, and fell asleep with the instantaneousness of one whose mind is suddenly relieved.

But when he went down to breakfast he didn't feel quite so sure. The twins didn't look, somehow, as though they would want to go to school. They had been busy with their luggage, and had unpacked one of the trunks for the first time since leaving Aunt Alice, and in honour of the heat and sunshine and the heavenly smell of heliotrope that was in the warm air, had put on white summer frocks.

Impossible to imagine anything cooler, sweeter, prettier and more angelically good than those two Annas looked as they came out on to the great verandah of the hotel to join Mr. Twist at breakfast. They instantly sank into the hotel consciousness. Mr. Twist had thought this wouldn't happen for a day or two, but he now perceived his mistake. Not a head that wasn't turned to look at them, not a newspaper that wasn't lowered. They were immediate objects of interest and curiosity, entirely benevolent interest and curiosity because nobody yet knew anything about them, and the wives of the rich husbands—those halves of the virtuous-rich unions which provided the virtuousness—smiled as they passed, and murmured nice words to each other like cute and cunning.

Mr. Twist, being a good American, stood up and held the twins' chairs for them when they appeared. They loved this; it seemed so respectful, and made them feel so old and looked-up to. He had done it that night in New York at supper, and at all the meals in the train in spite of the train being so wobbly and each time they had loved it. "It makes one have such self-respect," they agreed, commenting on this agreeable practice in private.

They sat down in the chairs with the gracious face of the properly treated, and inquired, with an amiability and a solicitous politeness on a par with their treatment how Mr. Twist had slept. They themselves had obviously slept well, for their faces were cherubic in their bland placidity, and already after one night wore what Mr. Twist later came to recognize as the Californian look, a look of complete unworriedness.

Yet they ought to have been worried. Mr. Twist had been terribly worried up to the moment in the night when he got his great idea, and he was worried again, now that he saw the twins, by doubts. They didn't look as though they would easily be put to school. His idea still seemed to him magnificent, a great solution, but would the Annas be able to see it? They might turn out impervious to it; not rejecting it, but simply non-absorbent. As they slowly and contentedly ate their grape-fruit, gazing out between the spoonfuls at the sea shining across the road through palm trees, and looking unruffled itself, he felt it was going to be rather like suggesting to two cherubs to leave their serene occupation of adoring eternal beauty and learn lessons instead. Still, it was the one way out, as far as Mr. Twist could see, of the situation produced by the death of the man Dellogg. "When you've done breakfast," he said, pulling himself together on their reaching the waffle stage, "we must have a talk."

"When we've done breakfast," said Anna-Rose, "we must have a walk."

"Down there," said Anna-Felicitas, pointing with her spoon. "On the sands. Round the curve to where the pink hills begin."

"Mr. Dellogg's death," said Mr. Twist, deciding it was necessary at once to wake them up out of the kind of happy somnolescence they seemed to be falling into, "has of course completely changed—"

"How unfortunate," interrupted Anna-Rose, her eyes on the palms and the sea and the exquisite distant mountains along the back of the bay, "to have to be dead on a day like this."

"It's not only his missing the fine weather that makes it unfortunate," said Mr. Twist.

"You mean," said Anna-Rose, "it's our missing him."

"Precisely," said Mr. Twist.

"Well, we know that," said Anna-Felicitas placidly.

"We knew it last night, and it worried us," said Anna-Rose. "Then we went to sleep and it didn't worry us. And this morning it still doesn't."

"No," said Mr. Twist dryly. "You don't look particularly worried, I must say."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, "we're not. People who find they've got to heaven aren't usually worried, are they."

"And having got to heaven," said Anna-Rose, "we've thought of a plan to enable us to stay in it."

"Oh have you," said Mr. Twist, pricking up his ears.

"The plan seemed to think of us rather than we of it," explained Anna-Felicitas. "It came and inserted itself, as it were, into our minds while we were dressing."

"Well, I've thought of a plan too," said Mr. Twist firmly, feeling sure that the twins' plan would be the sort that ought to be instantly nipped in the bud.

He was therefore greatly astonished when Anna-Rose said, "Have you? Is it about schools?"

He stared at her in silence. "Yes," he then said slowly, for he was very much surprised. "It is."

"So is ours," said Anna-Rose.

"Indeed," said Mr. Twist.

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "We don't think much of it, but it will tide us over."

"Exactly," said Mr. Twist, still more astonished at this perfect harmony of ideas.

"Tide us over till Mrs. Dellogg is—-" began Anna-Rose in her clear little voice that carried like a flute to all the tables round them.

Mr. Twist got up quickly. "If you've finished let us go out of doors," he said; for he perceived that silence had fallen on the other tables, and attentiveness to what Anna-Rose was going to say next.

"Yes. On the sands," said the twins, getting up too.

On the sands, however, Mr. Twist soon discovered that the harmony of ideas was not as complete as he had supposed; indeed, something very like heated argument began almost as soon as they were seated on some rocks round the corner of the shore to the west of the hotel and they became aware, through conversation, of the vital difference in the two plans.

The Twinkler plan, which they expounded at much length and with a profusion of optimistic detail, was to search for and find a school in the neighbourhood for the daughters of gentlemen, and go to it for three months, or six months, or whatever time Mrs. Dellogg wanted to recover in.

Up to this point the harmony was complete, and Mr. Twist could only nod approval. Beyond it all was confusion, for it appeared that the twins didn't dream of entering a school in any capacity except as teachers. Professors, they said; professors of languages and literatures. They could speak German, as they pointed out, very much better than most people, and had, as Mr. Twist had sometimes himself remarked, an extensive vocabulary in English. They would give lessons in English and German literature. They would be able to teach quite a lot about Heine, for instance, the whole of whose poetry they knew by heart and whose sad life in Paris—

"It's no good running on like that," interrupted Mr. Twist. "You're not old enough."

Not old enough? The Twinklers, from their separate rocks, looked at each other in surprised indignation.

"Not old enough?" repeated Anna-Rose. "We're grown up. And I don't see how one can be more than grown up. One either is or isn't grown up. And there can be no doubt as to which we are."

And this the very man who so respectfully had been holding their chairs for them only a few minutes before! As if people did things like that for children.

"You're not old enough I say," said Mr. Twist again, bringing his hand down with a slap on the rock to emphasize his words. "Nobody would take you. Why, you've got perambulator faces, the pair of you—"

"Perambulator—?"

"And what school is going to want two teachers both teaching the same thing, anyway?"

And he then quickly got out his plan, and the conversation became so heated that for a time it was molten.

The Twinklers were shocked by his plan. More; they were outraged. Go to school? To a place they had never been to even in their suitable years? They, two independent grown-ups with £200 in the bank and nobody with any right to stop their doing anything they wanted to? Go to school now, like a couple of little suck-a-thumbs?

It was Anna-Rose, very flushed and bright of eye, who flung this expression at Mr. Twist from her rock. He might think they had perambulator faces if he liked—they didn't care, but they did desire him to bear in mind that if it hadn't been for the war they would be now taking their proper place in society, that they had already done a course of nursing in a hospital, an activity not open to any but adults, and that Uncle Arthur had certainly not given them all that money to fritter away on paying for belated schooling.

"We would be anachronisms," said Anna-Felicitas, winding up the discussion with a firmness so unusual in her that it showed how completely she had been stirred.

"Are you aware that we are marriageable?" inquired Anna-Rose icily.

"And don't you think it's bad enough for us to be aliens and undesirables," asked Anna-Felicitas, "without getting chronologically confused as well?"

Mr. Twist was quiet for a bit. He couldn't compete with the Twinklers when it came to sheer language. He sat hunched on his rock, his face supported by his two fists, staring out to sea while the twins watched him indignantly. School indeed! Then presently he pushed his hat back and began slowly to rub his ear.

"Well, I'm blest if I know what to do with you, then," he said, continuing to rub his ear and stare out to sea.

The twins opened their mouths simultaneously at this to protest against any necessity for such knowledge on his part, but he interrupted them. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'd like to resume this discussion when you're both a little more composed."

"We're perfectly composed," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Less ruffled, then."

"We're quite unruffled," said Anna-Rose.

"Well, you don't look it, and you don't sound like it. But as this is important I'd be glad to resume the discussion, say, to-morrow. I suggest we spend to-day exploring the neighbourhood and steadying our minds—"

"Our minds are perfectly steady, thank you."

"—and to-morrow we'll have another go at this question. I haven't told you all my plan yet"—Mr. Twist hadn't had time to inform them of his wish to become their guardian, owing to the swiftness with which he had been engulfed in their indignation,—"but whether you approve of it or not, what is quite certain is that we can't stay on at the hotel much longer."

"Because it's so dear?"

"Oh, it isn't so much that,—the proprietor is a friend of mine, or anyhow he very well might be—"

"It looks very dear," said Anna-Rose, visions of their splendid bedroom and bathroom rising before her. They too had slept in silken beds, and the taps in their bathroom they had judged to be pure gold.

"And it's because we can't afford to be in a dear place spending money," said Anna-Felicitas, "that it's so important we should find a salaried position in a school without loss of time."

"And it's because we can't afford reckless squandering that we ought to start looking for such a situation at once" said Anna-Rose.

"Not to-day," said Mr. Twist firmly, for he wouldn't give up the hope of getting them, once they were used to it, to come round to his plan. "To-day, this one day, we'll give ourselves up to enjoyment. It'll do us all good. Besides, we don't often get to a place like this, do we. And it has taken some getting to, hasn't it."

He rose from his rock and offered his hand to help them off theirs.

"To-day enjoyment," he said, "to-morrow business. I'm crazy," he added artfully, "to see what the country is like away up in those hills."

And so it was that about five o'clock that afternoon, having spent the whole day exploring the charming environs of Acapulco,—having been seen at different periods going over the Old Mission in tow of a monk who wouldn't look at them but kept his eyes carefully fixed on the ground, sitting on high stools eating strange and enchanting ices at the shop in the town that has the best ices, bathing deliciously in the warm sea at the foot of a cliff along the top of which a great hedge of rose-coloured geraniums flared against the sky, lunching under a grove of ilexes on the contents of a basket produced by Mr. Twist from somewhere in the car he had hired, wandering afterwards up through eucalyptus woods across the fields towards the foot of the mountains,—they came about five o'clock, thirsty and thinking of tea, to a delightful group of flowery cottages clustering round a restaurant and forming collectively, as Mr. Twist explained, one of the many American forms of hotel. "To which," he said, "people not living in the cottages can come and have meals at the restaurant, so we'll go right in and have tea."

And it was just because they couldn't get tea—any other meal, the proprietress said, but no teas were served, owing to the Domestic Help Eight Hours Bill which obliged her to do without domestics during the afternoon hours—that Anna-Felicitas came by her great idea.

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CHAPTER XXI

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.

It fell upon her like a blow. It struck her fairly, as it were, between the eyes. She wasn't used to ideas, and she stopped dead in the middle of a piece of toast and looked at the others. They stopped too in their eating and looked at her.

"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.

"Well, tell us," said Anna-Rose. "But not," she added, thinking of Moses, "if it's only more commandments."

Anna-Felicitas dropped the piece of toast she was still holding in her fingers, and pushed back her cup. "Come out on to the rocks," she said getting up—"where we sat this morning." And she marched out, followed by the other two with the odd submissiveness people show towards any one who is thoroughly determined.

It was dark and dinner-time before they got back to the hotel. Throughout the sunset Anna-Felicitas sat on her rock, the same rock she had sat on so unsatisfactorily eight hours earlier, and expounded her idea. She couldn't talk fast enough. She, so slow and listless, for once was shaken into burning activity. She threw off her hat directly she got on to the sands, climbed up the rock as if it were a pulpit, and with her hands clasped round her knees poured out her plan, the long shafts of the setting sun bathing her in bright flames and making her more like Moses than ever,—if, that is, one could imagine Moses as beautiful as Anna-F., thought Anna-Rose, and as felicitously without his nose and beard.

It was wonderful how complete Anna-Felicitas's inspiration was. It reminded Mr. Twist of his own about the teapot. It was, of course, a far more complicated matter than that little device of his, and would have to be thought out very carefully and approached very judiciously, but the wealth of detail she was already ready with immensely impressed him. She even had a name for the thing; and it was when he heard this name, when it flashed into her talk with the unpremeditatedness of an inspiration, that Mr. Twist became definitely enthusiastic.

He had an American eye for advertisement. Respect for it was in his blood. He instantly saw the possibilities contained in the name. He saw what could be done with it, properly worked. He saw it on hoarding-on signposts, in a thousand contrivances for catching the public attention and sticking there.

The idea, of course, was fantastic, unconventional, definitely outside what his mother and that man Uncle Arthur would consider proper, but it was outside the standards of such people that life and fruitfulness and interest and joy began. He had escaped from the death-like grip of his mother, and Uncle Arthur had himself forcibly expulsed the Annas from his, and now that they were all so far away, instead of still timorously trying to go on living up to those distant sterile ideas why shouldn't they boldly go out into the light and colour that was waiting everywhere for the free of spirit?

Mr. Twist had often observed how perplexingly much there is to be said for the opposite sides of a question. He was now, but with no perplexity, for Anna-Felicitas had roused his enthusiasm, himself taking the very opposite view as to the proper thing for the twins to do from the one he had taken in the night and on the rocks that morning. School? Nonsense. Absurd to bury these bright shoots of everlastingness—this is what they looked like to him, afire with enthusiasm and the setting sun—in such a place of ink. If the plan, owing to the extreme youth of the Annas, were unconventional, conventionality could be secured by giving a big enough salary to a middle-aged lady to come and preside. He himself would hover beneficently in the background over the undertaking.

Anna-Felicitas's idea was to use Uncle Arthur's £200 in renting one of the little wooden cottages that seemed to be plentiful, preferably one about five miles out in the country, make it look inside like an English cottage, all pewter and chintz and valances, make it look outside like the more innocent type of German wayside inn, with green tables and spreading trees, get a cook who would concentrate on cakes, real lovely ones, various, poetic, wonderful cakes, and start an inn for tea alone that should become the fashion. It ought to be so arranged that it became the fashion. She and Anna-Rose would do the waiting. The prices would be very high, indeed exorbitant—this Mr. Twist regarded as another inspiration,—so that it should be a distinction, give people a cachet, to have had tea at their cottage; and in a prominent position in the road in front of it, where every motor-car would be bound to see it, there would be a real wayside inn signboard, such as inns in England always have, with its name on it.

"If people here were really neutral you might have the Imperial arms of Germany and England emblazoned on it," interrupted Mr. Twist, "just to show your own extreme and peculiar neutrality."

"We might call it The Christopher and Columbus," interrupted Anna-Rose, who had been sitting open-mouthed hanging on Anna-Felicitas's words.

"Or you might call it The Cup and Saucer," said Mr. Twist, "and have a big cup brimming with tea and cream painted on it—"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas. "It is The Open Arms. That is its name."

And Mr. Twist, inclined to smile and criticise up to this, bowed his head in instantaneous recognition and acceptance.

He became definitely enthusiastic. Of course he would see to it that not a shadow of ambiguousness was allowed to rest on such a name. The whole thing as he saw it, his mind working rapidly while Anna-Felicitas still talked, would be a happy joke, a joyous, gay little assault on the purses of millionaires, in whom the district abounded judging from the beautiful houses and gardens he had passed that day,—but a joke and a gay assault that would at the same time employ and support the Annas; solve them, in fact, saw Mr. Twist, who all day long had been regarding them much as one does a difficult mathematical problem.

It was Mr. Twist who added the final inspiration to Anna-Felicitas's many, when at last she paused for want of breath. The inn, he said, should be run as a war philanthropy. All that was over after the expenses were paid and a proper percentage reserved by the Annas as interest on their invested capital—they listened with eager respect to these business-like expressions—would be handed over to the American Red Cross. "That," explained Mr. Twist, "would seal the inn as both respectable and fashionable, which is exactly what we would want to make it."

And he then announced, and they accepted without argument or questioning in the general excitement, that he would have himself appointed their legal guardian.

They didn't go back to the Cosmopolitan till dinnertime, there was so much to say, and after dinner, a meal at which Mr. Twist had to suppress them a good deal because The Open Arms kept on bursting through into their talk and, as at breakfast, the people at the tables round them were obviously trying to hear, they went out once again on to the sea-front and walked up and down till late continuing the discussion, mostly simultaneously as regards the twins, while Mr. Twist chimed in with practical suggestions whenever they stopped to take breath.

He had to drive them indoors to bed at last, for the lights were going out one by one in the Cosmopolitan bedroom windows, where the virtuous rich, exhausted by their day of virtue, were subsiding, prostrate with boredom and respectability, into their various legitimate lairs, and he stayed alone out by the sea rapidly sketching out his activities for the next day.

There was the guardianship to be arranged, the cottage to be found, and the middle-aged lady to be advertised for. She, indeed, must be secured at once; got to come at once to the Cosmopolitan and preside over the twins until they all proceeded in due season to The Open Arms. She must be a motherly middle-aged lady, decided Mr. Twist, affectionate, skilled in managing a cook, business-like, intellectual, and obedient. Her feminine tact would enable her to appear to preside while she was in reality obeying. She must understand that she was there for the Annas, and that the Annas were not there for her. She must approach the situation in the spirit of the enlightened king of a democratic country, who receives its honours, accepts its respect, but does not lose sight of the fact that he is merely the Chief Servant of the people. Mr. Twist didn't want a female Uncle Arthur let loose upon those blessed little girls; besides, they would have the dangerous weapon in their hands of being able to give her notice, and it would considerably dim the reputation of The Open Arms if there were a too frequent departure from it of middle-aged ladies.

Mr. Twist felt himself very responsible and full of anxieties as he paced up and down alone, but he was really enjoying himself. That youthful side of him, so usual in the artistic temperament, which leaped about at the least pleasant provocation like a happy lamb when the sunshine tickles it, was feeling that this was great fun; and the business side of him was feeling that it was not only great fun but probably an extraordinarily productive piece of money-making.

The ignorant Annas—bless their little hearts, he thought, he who only the night before on that very spot had been calling them accursed—believed that their £200 was easily going to do everything. This was lucky, for otherwise there would have been some thorny paths of argument and convincing to be got through before they would have allowed him to help finance the undertaking; probably they never would have, in their scrupulous independence. Mr. Twist reflected with satisfaction on the usefulness of his teapot. At last he was going to be able to do something, thanks to it, that gave him real gladness. His ambulance to France—that was duty. His lavishness to his mother—that again was duty. But here was delight, here at last was what his lonely heart had always longed for,—a chance to help and make happy, and be with and watch being made happy, dear women-things, dear soft sweet kind women-things, dear sister-things, dear children-things....

It has been said somewhere before that Mr. Twist was meant by Nature to be a mother; but Nature, when she was half-way through him, forgot and turned him into a man.

---

CHAPTER XXII

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.

It hadn't been lived in for years, and it was well on in decay, being made of wood, but the situation was perfect for The Open Arms. Every motorist coming up that road would see the signboard outside the pepper trees, and would certainly want to stop at the neat little gate, and pass through the flowery tunnel that would be cut through the syringas, and see what was inside. Other houses were offered of a far higher class, for this one had never been lived in by gentry, said the house-agent endeavouring to put them off a thing so broken down. A farmer had had it years back, he told them, and instead of confining himself to drinking the milk from his own cows, which was the only appropriate drink for a farmer the agent maintained—he was the president of the local Anti-Vice-In-All-Its-Forms League—he put his money as he earned it into gin, and the gin into himself, and so after a bit was done for.

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.

This belief, however, received a blow when they went without Mr. Twist, who was too busy now for any extra expeditions, to choose and buy chintzes, and it was finally shattered when the various middle-aged ladies who responded to Mr. Twist's cry for help in the advertising columns of the Acapulco and Los Angeles press one and all demanded as salary more than the whole Twinkler capital.

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.

"One run on co-operative lines, of course," said Anna-Rose grandly. "Everybody pays for everything, so that nobody particular pays for anything."

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas.

"I mean," said Anna-Rose, who felt herself that this might be clearer, "it's when you pay the servants and the rent and the cakes and things out of what you get."

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas. "And will they wait quite quietly till we've got it?"

"Of course, if we're all co-operative."

"I see," said Anna-Felicitas, who saw as little as before, but knew of old that Anna-Rose grew irascible when pressed.

"See here now," said Mr. Twist weightily, "if that isn't an idea. Only you've got hold of the wrong word. The word you want is profit-sharing. And as this undertaking is going to be a big success there will be big profits, and any amount of cakes and salaries will be paid for as glibly and easily as you can say your ABC."

And he explained that till they were fairly started he was going to stay in California, and that he intended during this time to be book-keeper, secretary, and treasurer to The Open Arms, besides Advertiser-in-Chief, which was, he said, the most important post of all; and if they would be so good as to leave this side of it unquestioningly to him, who had had a business training, he would undertake that the Red Cross, American or British, whichever they decided to support, should profit handsomely.

Thus did Mr. Twist artfully obtain a free hand as financial backer of The Open Arms. The profit-sharing system seemed to the twins admirable. It cleared away every scruple and every difficulty, they now bought chintzes and pewter pots in the faith of it without a qualm, and even ceased to blench at the salary of the lady engaged to be their background,—indeed her very expensiveness pleased them, for it gave them confidence that she must at such a price be the right one, because nobody, they agreed, who knew herself not to be the right one would have the face to demand so much.

This lady, the widow of Bruce D. Bilton of Chicago of whom of course, she said, the Miss Twinklers had heard—the Miss Twinklers blushed and felt ashamed of themselves because they hadn't, and indistinctly murmured something about having heard of Cornelius K. Vanderbilt, though, and wouldn't he do—had a great deal of very beautiful snow-white hair, while at the same time she was only middle-aged. She firmly announced, when she perceived Mr. Twist's spectacles dwelling on her hair, that she wasn't yet forty, and her one fear was that she mightn't be middle-aged enough. The advertisement had particularly mentioned middle-aged; and though she was aware that her brains and fingers and feet couldn't possibly be described as coming under that heading, she said her hair, on the other hand, might well be regarded as having overshot the mark. But its turning white had nothing to do with age. It had done that when Mr. Bilton passed over. No hair could have stood such grief as hers when Mr. Bilton took that final step. She had been considering the question of age, she informed Mr. Twist, from every aspect before coming to the interview, for she didn't want to make a mistake herself nor allow the Miss Twinklers to make a mistake; and she had arrived at the conclusion that what with her hair being too old and the rest of her being too young, taken altogether she struck an absolute average and perfectly fulfilled the condition required; and as she wished to live in the country, town life disturbing her psychically too much, she was willing to give up her home and her circle—it was a real sacrifice—and accept the position offered by the Miss Twinklers. She was, she said, very quiet, and yet at the same time she was very active. She liked to fly round among duties, and she liked to retire into her own mentality and think. She was all for equilibrium, for the right balancing of body and mind in a proper alternation of suitable action. Thus she attained poise,—she was one of the most poised women her friends knew, they told her. Also she had a warm heart, and liked both philanthropy and orphans. Especially if they were war ones.

Mrs. Bilton talked so quickly and so profusely that it took quite a long time to engage her. There never seemed to be a pause in which one could do it. It was in Los Angeles, in an hotel to which Mr. Twist had motored the twins, starting at daybreak that morning in order to see this lady, that the personal interview took place, and by lunch-time they had been personally interviewing her for three hours without stopping. It seemed years. The twins longed to engage her, if only to keep her quiet; but Mrs. Bilton's spirited description of life as she saw it and of the way it affected something she called her psyche, was without punctuation and without even the tiny gap of a comma in it through which one might have dexterously slipped a definite offer. She had to be interrupted at last, in spite of the discomfort this gave to the Twinkler and Twist politeness, because a cook was coming to be interviewed directly after lunch, and they were dying for some food.

The moment Mr. Twist saw Mrs. Bilton's beautiful white hair he knew she was the one. That hair was what The Open Arms wanted and must have; that hair, with a well-made black dress to go with it, would be a shield through which no breath of misunderstanding as to the singleness of purpose with which the inn was run would ever penetrate. He would have settled it with her in five minutes if she could have been got to listen, but Mrs. Bilton couldn't be got to listen; and when it became clear that no amount of patient waiting would bring him any nearer the end of what she had to say Mr. Twist was forced to take off his coat, as it were, and plunge abruptly into the very middle of her flow of words and convey to her as quickly as possible, as one swimming for his life against the stream, that she was engaged. "Engaged, Mrs. Bilton,"—he called out, raising his voice above the sound of Mrs. Bilton's rushing words, "engaged." She would be expected at the Cosmopolitan, swiftly continued Mr. Twist, who was as particularly anxious to have her at the Cosmopolitan as the twins were particularly anxious not to,—for for the life of them they couldn't see why Mrs. Bilton should be stirred up before they started inhabiting the cottage,—within three days—

"Mr. Twist, it can't be done," broke in Mrs. Bilton a fresh and mountainous wave of speech gathering above Mr. Twist's head. "It absolutely—"

"Within a week, then," he called out quickly, holding up the breaking of the wave for an instant while he hastened to and opened the door. "And goodmorning Mrs. Bilton—my apologies, my sincere apologies, but we have to hurry away—"

The cook was engaged that afternoon. Mr. Twist appeared to have mixed up the answers to his advertisement, for when, after paying the luncheon-bill, he went to join the twins in the sitting-room, he found them waiting for him in the passage outside the door looking excited.

"The cook's come," whispered Anna-Rose, jerking her head towards the shut door. "She's a man."

"She's a Chinaman," whispered Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist was surprised. He thought he had an appointment with a woman,—a coloured lady from South Carolina who was a specialist in pastries and had immaculate references, but the Chinaman assured him that he hadn't, and that his appointment was with him alone, with him, Li Koo. In proof of it, he said, spreading out his hands, here he was. "We make cakies—li'l cakies—many, lovely li'l cakies," said Li Koo, observing doubt on the gentleman's face; and from somewhere on his person he whipped out a paper bag of them as a conjurer whips a rabbit out of a hat, and offered them to the twins.

They ate. He was engaged. It took five minutes.

After he had gone, and punctually to the minute of her appointment, an over-flowing Negress appeared and announced that she was the coloured lady from South Carolina to whom the gentleman had written.

Mr. Twist uncomfortably felt that Li Koo had somehow been clever. Impossible, however, to go back on him, having eaten his cakes. Besides, they were perfect cakes, blown together apparently out of flowers and honey and cream,—cakes which, combined with Mrs. Bilton's hair, would make the fortune of The Open Arms.

The coloured lady, therefore, was sent away, disappointed in spite of the douceur and fair words Mr. Twist gave her; and she was so much disappointed that they could hear her being it out loud all the way along the passage and down the stairs, and the nature of her expression of her disappointment was such that Mr. Twist, as he tried by animated conversation to prevent it reaching the twins' ears, could only be thankful after all that Li Koo had been so clever. It did, however, reach the twins' ears, but they didn't turn a hair because of Uncle Arthur. They merely expressed surprise at its redness, seeing that it came out of somebody so black.

Directly after this trip to Los Angeles advertisements began to creep over the countryside. They crept along the roads where motorists were frequent and peeped at passing cars round corners and over hedges. They were taciturn advertisements, and just said three words in big, straight, plain white letters on a sea-blue ground: