“Or you might call it The Cup and Saucer,” said Mr. Twist, “and have a big cup brimming with tea and cream painted on it—­”

“No,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “It is The Open Arms.  That is its name.”

And Mr. Twist, inclined to smile and criticise up to this, bowed his head in instantaneous recognition and acceptance.

He became definitely enthusiastic.  Of course he would see to it that not a shadow of ambiguousness was allowed to rest on such a name.  The whole thing as he saw it, his mind working rapidly while Anna-Felicitas still talked, would be a happy joke, a joyous, gay little assault on the purses of millionaires, in whom the district abounded judging from the beautiful houses and gardens he had passed that day,—­but a joke and a gay assault that would at the same time employ and support the Annas; solve them, in fact, saw Mr. Twist, who all day long had been regarding them much as one does a difficult mathematical problem.

It was Mr. Twist who added the final inspiration to Anna-Felicitas’s many, when at last she paused for want of breath.  The inn, he said, should be run as a war philanthropy.  All that was over after the expenses were paid and a proper percentage reserved by the Annas as interest on their invested capital—­they listened with eager respect to these business-like expressions—­would be handed over to the American Red Cross.  “That,” explained Mr. Twist, “would seal the inn as both respectable and fashionable, which is exactly what we would want to make it.”

And he then announced, and they accepted without argument or questioning in the general excitement, that he would have himself appointed their legal guardian.

They didn’t go back to the Cosmopolitan till dinnertime, there was so much to say, and after dinner, a meal at which Mr. Twist had to suppress them a good deal because The Open Arms kept on bursting through into their talk and, as at breakfast, the people at the tables round them were obviously trying to hear, they went out once again on to the sea-front and walked up and down till late continuing the discussion, mostly simultaneously as regards the twins, while Mr. Twist chimed in with practical suggestions whenever they stopped to take breath.

He had to drive them indoors to bed at last, for the lights were going out one by one in the Cosmopolitan bedroom windows, where the virtuous rich, exhausted by their day of virtue, were subsiding, prostrate with boredom and respectability, into their various legitimate lairs, and he stayed alone out by the sea rapidly sketching out his activities for the next day.