ht Mr. Twist; funny man,--yet otherwise so sagacious. It is true he
need only propose to one of them, for which he thanked God, but he could
imagine what that one, and what the other one too, who would be sure to
be somewhere quite near would ... no, he couldn't imagine; he preferred
not to imagine.

Mr. Twist's dampness increased, and a passing car got his mud-guard. It
was a big car which crackled with language as it whizzed on its way, and
Mr. Twist, slewed by the impact half across the road, then perceived on
which side he had been driving.

The lane up to the inn was in its middle-day emptiness and somnolence.
Where Anna-Felicitas and Elliott had been sitting cool and shaded when
he passed before, there was only the pressed-down grass and crushed
flowers in a glare of sun. She had gone home long ago of course. She
said she was going to be very busy. Secretly he wished she hadn't gone
home, and that little Christopher too might for a bit be somewhere else,
so that when he arrived he wouldn't immediately have to face everybody
at once. He wanted to think; he wanted to have time to think; time
before four o'clock came, and with four o'clock, if he hadn't come to
any conclusion about shutting up the inn--and how could he if nobody
gave him time to think?--those accursed, swarming Germans. It was they
who had done all this. Mr. Twist blazed into sudden fury. They and their
blasted war....

At the gate stood Anna-Rose. Her face looked quite pale in the green
shade of the tunnelled-out syringa bushes. She as peering out down the
lane watching him approach. This was awful, thought Mr. Twist. At the
very gate one of them. Confronted at once. No time, not a minute's time
given him to think.

"Oh," cried out Anna-Rose the instant he pulled up, for she had waved to
him to stop when he tried to drive straight on round to the stable, "she
isn't with you?"

"Who isn't?" asked Mr. Twist.

Anna-Rose became paler than ever. "She has been kidnapped," she said.

"How's that?" said Mr. Twist, staring at her from the car.

"Kidnapped," repeated Anna-Rose, with wide-open horror-stricken eyes;
for from her nursery she carried with her at the bottom of her mind,
half-forgotten but ready to fly up to the top at any moment of panic, an
impression that the chief activities and recreations of all those
Americans who weren't really good were two: they lynched, and they
kidnapped. They lynched you if they didn't like you enough, and if