ds 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 hedg