h is the same thing. I believe," she
added, "I now have to allude to him as John."

Mr. Twist made another effort to speak calmly. "You don't," he said,
"think it at all unusual or undesirable that you should be calling a man
John to-day of whom you'd never heard yesterday."

"I think it's wonderful," said Anna-Felicitas beaming.

"It doesn't strike you in any way as imprudent to be so hasty. It
doesn't strike you as foolish."

"On the contrary," said Anna-Felicitas. "I can't help thinking I've
been very clever. I shouldn't have thought it of myself. You see, I'm
not _naturally_ quick." And she beamed with what she evidently regarded
as a pardonable pride.

"It doesn't strike you as even a little--well, a little improper."

"On the contrary," said Anna-Felicitas. "Aunt Alice told us that the one
man one could never be improper about, even if one tried, was one's
husband."

"Husband?" Mr. Twist winced. He loved, as we have seen, the word wife,
but then that was different.

"It's not time yet to talk of husbands," he said, full of a flaming
unreasonableness and jealousy and the sore feeling that he who had been
toiling so long and so devotedly in the heat of the Twinkler sun had had
a most unfair march stolen on him by this eleventh-hour stranger.

He flamed with unreasonableness. Yet he knew this was the solution of
half his problem,--and of much the worst half, for it was after all
Anna-Felicitas who had produced the uncomfortable feeling of
slipperiness, of eels; Anna-Rose had been quite good, sitting in a chair
crying and just so sweetly needing comfort. But now that the solution
was presented to him he was full of fears. For on what now could he base
his proposal to Anna-Rose? Elliott would be the legitimate protector of
both the Twinklers. Mr. Twist, who had been so much perturbed by the
idea of having to propose to one or other twin, was miserably upset by
the realization that now he needn't propose to either. Elliott had cut
the ground from under his feet. He had indeed--what was the expression
he used the evening before?--yes, nipped in. There was now no necessity
for Anna-Rose to marry him, and Mr. Twist had an icy and forlorn
feeling that on no other basis except necessity would she. He was
thirty-five. It was all very well for Elliott to get proposing to people
of seventeen; he couldn't be more than twenty-five. And it wasn't only
age. Mr. Twist hadn't shaved before looking-glasses for nothing, and h