“And then, you see, she gets thinking—­”

“Thinking!  Reading doesn’t make me think.”

“With much regret,” wrote the matron to Aunt Alice, “I am obliged to dismiss your younger niece, Nurse Twinkler II.  She has no vocation for nursing.  On the other hand, your elder niece is shaping well and I shall be pleased to keep her on.”

“But I can’t stop on,” Anna-Rose said to the matron when she announced these decisions to her.  “I can’t be separated from my sister.  I’d like very much to know what would become of that poor child without me to look after her.  You forget I’m the eldest.”

The matron put down her pen,—­she was a woman who made many notes—­and stared at Nurse Twinkler.  Not in this fashion did her nurses speak to her.  But Anna-Rose, having been brought up in a spot remote from everything except love and laughter, had all the fearlessness of ignorance; and in her extreme youth and smallness, with her eyes shining and her face heated she appeared to the matron rather like an indignant kitten.

“Very well,” said the matron gravely, suppressing a smile.  “One should always do what one considers one’s first duty.”

So the Twinklers went back to Uncle Arthur, and the matron was greatly relieved, for she certainly didn’t want them, and Uncle Arthur said Damn.

“Arthur,” gently reproved his wife.

“I say Damn and I mean Damn,” said Uncle Arthur.  “What the hell can we—­”

“Arthur,” said his wife.

“I say, what the hell can we do with a couple of Germans?  If people wouldn’t swallow them last winter are they going to swallow them any better now?  God, what troubles a man lets himself in for when he marries!”

“I do beg you, Arthur, not to use those coarse words,” said Aunt Alice, tears in her gentle eyes.

There followed a period of desperate exertion on the part of Aunt Alice.  She answered advertisements and offered the twins as nursery governesses, as cheerful companions, as mothers’ helps, even as orphans willing to be adopted.  She relinquished every claim on salaries, she offered them for nothing, and at last she offered them accompanied by a bonus.  “Their mother was English.  They are quite English,” wrote Aunt Alice innumerable times in innumerable letters.  “I feel bound, however, to tell you that they once had a German father, but of course it was through no fault of their own,” etc., etc.  Aunt Alice’s hand ached with writing letters; and any solution of the problem that might possibly have been arrived at came to nothing because Anna-Rose would not be separated from Anna-Felicitas, and if it was difficult to find anybody who would take on one German nobody at all could be found to take on two.

Meanwhile Uncle Arthur grew nightly more dreadful in bed.  Aunt Alice was at her wits’ end, and took to crying helplessly.  The twins racked their brains to find a way out, quite as anxious to relieve Uncle Arthur of their presence as he was to be relieved.  If only they could be independent, do something, work, go as housemaids,—­anything.