tever."

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 frien