ied that he was.

The last few days before the opening were as full of present joy and
promise of yet greater joys to come as the last few days of a happy
betrothal. They reminded Anna-Felicitas of those days in April, those
enchanting days she had always loved the best, when the bees get busy
for the first time, and suddenly there are wallflowers and a flowering
currant bush and the sound of the lawn being mown and the smell of cut
grass. How one's heart leaps up to greet them, she thought. What a
thrill of delight rushes through one's body, of new hope, of delicious
expectation.

Even Li Koo, the wooden-faced, the brief and rare of speech seemed to
feel the prevailing satisfaction and harmony and could be heard in the
evenings singing strange songs among his pots. And what he was singing,
only nobody knew it, were soft Chinese hymns of praise of the two
white-lily girls, whose hair was woven sunlight, and whose eyes were
deep and blue even as the waters that washed about the shores of his
father's dwelling-place. For Li Koo, the impassive and inarticulate, in
secret seethed with passion. Which was why his cakes were so wonderful.
He had to express himself somehow.

But while up on their sun-lit, eucalyptus-crowned slopes Mr. Twist and
his party--he always thought of them as his party--were innocently and
happily busy full of hopefulness and mutual goodwill, down in the town
and in the houses scattered over the lovely country round the town,
people were talking. Everybody knew about the house Teapot Twist was
doing up, for the daily paper had told them that Mr. Edward A. Twist had
bought the long uninhabited farmhouse in Pepper Lane known as Batt's,
and was converting it into a little _ventre-a-terre_ for his widowed
mother--launching once more into French, as though there were something
about Mr. Twist magnetic to that language. Everybody knew this, and it
was perfectly natural for a well-off Easterner to have a little place
out West, even if the choice of the little place was whimsical. But what
about the Miss Twinklers? Who and what were they? And also, Why?

There were three weeks between the departure of the Twist party from the
Cosmopolitan and the opening of the inn, and in that time much had been
done in the way of conjecture. The first waves of it flowed out from the
Cosmopolitan, and were met almost at once by waves flowing in from the
town. Good-natured curiosity gave place to excited curiosity when the