“What’s the matter?” asked Anna-Rose.  “Has another button come off?”

At this Mr. Twist considered it wisest to turn his head away, for experience had taught him that Anna-Felicitas easily came undone.

“I’ve thought of something,” said Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist turned his head back again.  “You don’t say,” he said, mildly sarcastic.

“Ich gratuliere,” said Anna-Rose, also mildly sarcastic.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “But it’s so luminous,” she said, looking from one to the other in a kind of surprise.  “Of course.  That’s what we’ll do.  Ridiculous to waste time bothering about schools.”

There was a new expression on her face that silenced the comments rising to Anna-Rose’s and Mr. Twist’s tongues, both of whom had tired feet and were therefore disposed to sarcasm.

Anna-Felicitas looked at them, and they looked at her, and her face continued to become visibly more and more illuminated, just as if a curtain were being pulled up.  Animation and interest shone in her usually dreamy eyes.  Her drooping body sat up quite straight.  She reminded Anna-Rose, who had a biblically well-furnished mind, of Moses when he came down from receiving the Law on the mountain.

“Well, tell us,” said Anna-Rose.  “But not,” she added, thinking of Moses, “if it’s only more commandments.”

Anna-Felicitas dropped the piece of toast she was still holding in her fingers, and pushed back her cup.  “Come out on to the rocks,” she said getting up—­“where we sat this morning.”  And she marched out, followed by the other two with the odd submissiveness people show towards any one who is thoroughly determined.

It was dark and dinner-time before they got back to the hotel.  Throughout the sunset Anna-Felicitas sat on her rock, the same rock she had sat on so unsatisfactorily eight hours earlier, and expounded her idea.  She couldn’t talk fast enough.  She, so slow and listless, for once was shaken into burning activity.  She threw off her hat directly she got on to the sands, climbed up the rock as if it were a pulpit, and with her hands clasped round her knees poured out her plan, the long shafts of the setting sun bathing her in bright flames and making her more like Moses than ever,—­if, that is, one could imagine Moses as beautiful as Anna-F., thought Anna-Rose, and as felicitously without his nose and beard.

It was wonderful how complete Anna-Felicitas’s inspiration was.  It reminded Mr. Twist of his own about the teapot.  It was, of course, a far more complicated matter than that little device of his, and would have to be thought out very carefully and approached very judiciously, but the wealth of detail she was already ready with immensely impressed him.  She even had a name for the thing; and it was when he heard this name, when it flashed into her talk with the unpremeditatedness of an inspiration, that Mr. Twist became definitely enthusiastic.