rumour got about that the Cosmopolitan had been obliged to ask Mr.
Twist to take his _entourage_ somewhere else. Was it possible the cute
little girls, so well known by sight on Main Street going from shop to
shop, were secretly scandalous? It seemed almost unbelievable, but
luckily nothing was really unbelievable.

The manager of the hotel, dropped in upon casually by one guest after
the other, and interviewed as well by determined gentlemen from the
local press, was not to be drawn. His reserve was most interesting. Miss
Heap knitted and knitted and was persistently enigmatic. Her silence was
most exciting. On the other hand, Mrs. Ridding's attitude was merely one
of contempt, dismissing the Twinklers with a heavy gesture. Why think or
trouble about a pair of chits like that? They had gone; Albert was quiet
again; and wasn't that the gong for dinner?

But doubts as to the private morals of the Twist _entourage_ presently
were superseded by much graver and more perturbing doubts. Nobody knew
when exactly this development took place. Acapulco had been enjoying the
first set of doubts. There was no denying that doubts about somebody
else's morals were not unpleasant. They did give one, if one examined
one's sensations carefully, a distinct agreeable tickle; they did add
the kick to lives which, if they had been virtuous for a very long time
like the lives of the Riddings, or virgin for a very long time like the
life of Miss Heap, were apt to be flat. But from the doubts that
presently appeared and overshadowed the earlier ones, one got nothing
but genuine discomfort and uneasiness. Nobody knew how or when they
started. Quite suddenly they were there.

This was in the November before America's coming into the war. The
feeling in Acapulco was violently anti-German. The great majority of the
inhabitants, permanent and temporary, were deeply concerned at the
conduct of their country in not having, immediately after the torpedoing
of the _Lusitania_, joined the Allies. They found it difficult to
understand, and were puzzled and suspicious, as well as humiliated in
their national pride. Germans who lived in the neighbourhood, or who
came across from the East for the winter, were politely tolerated, but
the attitude toward them was one of growing watchfulness and distrust;
and week by week the whispered stories of spies and gun-emplacements and
secret stores of arms in these people's cellars or back gardens, grew
more insiste