h the view from under its dark shade across the sunny
fields to the sea and the delicate distant islands, a painful spot. The
beauty all round them was under these conditions exasperating. Only once
did Mrs. Bilton leave them, and that was the first afternoon, when they
instantly fled to seek out Mr. Twist; and she only left them then--for
it wasn't just her sense of duty that was strong, but also her dislike
of being alone--because something unexpectedly gave way in the upper
part of her dress, she being of a tight well-held-in figure, depending
much on its buttons; and she had very hastily to go in search of a
needle.

After that they didn't see Mr. Twist alone for several days. They hardly
indeed saw him at all. The only meal he shared with them was supper, and
on finding the first evening that Mrs. Bilton read aloud to people after
supper, he made the excuse of accounts to go through and went into his
bedroom, repeating this each night.

The twins watched him go with agonized eyes. They considered themselves
deserted; shamefully abandoned to a miserable fate.

"And it isn't as if he didn't _like_ reading aloud," whispered
Anna-Rose, bewildered and indignant as she remembered the "Ode to
Dooty."

"Perhaps he's one of those people who only like it if they do it
themselves," Anna-Felicitas whispered back, trying to explain his base
behaviour.

And while they whispered, Mrs. Bilton with great enjoyment
declaimed--she had had a course of elocution lessons during Mr. Bilton's
life so as to be able to place the best literature advantageously before
him--the diary of a young girl written in prison. The young girl had
been wrongfully incarcerated, Mrs. Bilton explained, and her pure soul
only found release by the demise of her body. The twins hated the young
girl from the first paragraph. She wrote her diary every day till her
demise stopped her. As nothing happens in prisons that hasn't happened
the day before, she could only write her reflections; and the twins
hated her reflections, because they were so very like what in their
secret moments of slush they were apt to reflect themselves. Their
mother had had a horror of slush. There had been none anywhere about
her; but it is in the air in Germany, in people's blood, everywhere; and
though the twins, owing to the English part of them, had a horror of it
too, there it was in them, and they knew it,--genuine German slush.

They felt uncomfortably sure that if they wer