they
liked you too much they kidnapped you. Anna-Felicitas, exquisite and
unsuspecting, had been kidnapped. Some American's concupiscent eye had
alighted on her, observed her beauty, and marked her down. No other
explanation was possible of a whole morning's absence from duties of one
so conscientious and painstaking as Anna-Felicitas. She never shirked;
that is, she never had been base enough to shirk alone. If there was any
shirking to be done they had always done it together. As the hours
passed and she didn't appear, Anna-Rose had tried to persuade herself
that she must have motored into Acapulco with Mr. Twist, strange and
unnatural and reprehensible and ignoble as such arch shirking would have
been; and now that the car had come back empty except for Mr. Twist she
was convinced the worst had happened--her beautiful, her precious
Columbus had been kidnapped.

"Kidnapped," she said again, wringing her hands.

Mr. Twist was horror-struck too, for he thought she was announcing the
kidnapping of Mrs. Bilton. Somehow he didn't think of Anna-Felicitas; he
had seen her too recently. But that Mrs. Bilton should be kidnapped
seemed to him to touch the lowest depths of American criminal enterprise
and depravity. At the same time though he recoiled before this fresh
blow a thought did fan through his mind with a wonderful effect of
coolness and silence,--"Then they'll gag her," he said.

"What?" cried Anna-Rose, as though a whip had lashed her. "Gag her?" And
pulling open the gate and running out to him as one possessed she cried
again, "Gag Columbus?"

"Oh that's it, is it," said Mr. Twist, with relief but also with
disappointment, "Well, if it's that way I can tell you--"

He stopped; there was no need to tell her; for round the bend of the
lane, walking bare-headed in the chequered light and shade as leisurely
as if such things as tours of absence didn't exist, or a distracted
household, or an anguished Christopher, with indeed, a complete, an
extraordinary serenity, advanced Anna-Felicitas.

Always placid, her placidity at this moment had a shining quality. Still
smug, she was now of a glorified smugness. If one could imagine a lily
turned into a god, or a young god turned into a lily and walking down
the middle of a sun-flecked Californian lane, it wouldn't be far out,
thought Mr. Twist, as an image of the advancing Twinkler. The god would
be so young that he was still a boy, and he wouldn't be worrying much
about