ou couldn't see
if a man was a guardian or not just by looking at him. Well, he would do
no more about it, it was much too difficult. Bother it. Let Mrs. Bilton
go on supposing he was the legal guardian of her charges. Anyway he had
all the intentions of a guardian. What a fool he had been to go to the
lawyer. Curse that lawyer. Now he knew, however distinctly and
frequently he, Mr. Twist, might say he was the Twinkler guardian, that
he wasn't.

It harassed Mr. Twist to perceive, as he did perceive with clearness,
that he had been a fool; but the twins, when he told them that evening
that owing to technical difficulties, with the details of which he
wouldn't trouble them, the guardianship was off, were pleased.

"We want to be bound to you," said Anna-Felicitas her eyes very soft and
her voice very gentle, "only by ties of affection and gratitude."

And Anna-Rose, turning red, opened her mouth as though she were going to
say something handsome like that too, but seemed unable after all to get
it out, and only said, rather inaudibly, "Yes."

CHAPTER XXIV

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

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

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

"Mind and not say anything to an