enings with them as well. He was immensely
grateful to Mrs. Bilton. Her grit had saved them. He esteemed and
respected her. Indeed, he shook hands with her then and there at the end
of her speech, and told her he did, and the least he could do after that
was to come to dinner. But this very genuine appreciation didn't prevent
his finding her at close quarters what Anna-Rose, greatly chastened, now
only called temperately "a little much," and the result was a really
frantic hurrying on of the work. He had rather taken, those first four
days of being relieved of responsibility in regard to the twins, to
finnicking with details, to dwelling lovingly on them with a sense of
having a margin to his time, and things accordingly had considerably
slowed down; but after twenty-four hours of Mrs. Bilton they hurried up
again, and after forty-eight of her the speed was headlong. At the end
of forty-eight hours it seemed to Mr. Twist more urgent than anything he
had ever known that he should get out of the shanty, get into somewhere
with space in it, and sound-proof walls--lots of walls--and long
passages between people's doors; and before the rooms in the inn were
anything like finished he insisted on moving in.

"You must turn to on this last lap and help fix them up," he said to the
twins. "It'll be a bit uncomfortable at first, but you must just take
off your coats to it and not mind."

Mind? Turn to? It was what they were languishing for. It was what, in
the arid hours under the ilex tree, collected so ignominiously round
Mrs. Bilton's knee they had been panting for, like thirsty dogs with
their tongues out. And such is the peculiar blessedness of work that
instantly, the moment there was any to be done, everything that was
tangled and irritating fell quite naturally into its proper place.
Magically life straightened itself out smooth, and left off being
difficult. _Arbeit und Liebe_, as their mother used to say, dropping
into German whenever a sentence seemed to her to sound better that
way--_Arbeit und Liebe_: these were the two great things of life; the
two great angels, as she assured them, under whose spread-out wings lay
happiness.

With a hungry zeal, with the violent energy of reaction, the Annas fell
upon work. They started unpacking. All the things they had bought in
Acapulco, the linen, the china, the teaspoons, the feminine touches that
had been piled up waiting in the barn, were pulled out and undone and
carried