As for Mr. Twist, he perceived he had been a fool.  Why had he gone to the lawyer at all?  Why not simply have announced to the world that he was the Twinkler guardian?  The twins themselves would have believed it if he had come in one day and said it was settled, and nobody outside would ever have dreamed of questioning it.  After all, you couldn’t see if a man was a guardian or not just by looking at him.  Well, he would do no more about it, it was much too difficult.  Bother it.  Let Mrs. Bilton go on supposing he was the legal guardian of her charges.  Anyway he had all the intentions of a guardian.  What a fool he had been to go to the lawyer.  Curse that lawyer.  Now he knew, however distinctly and frequently he, Mr. Twist, might say he was the Twinkler guardian, that he wasn’t.

It harassed Mr. Twist to perceive, as he did perceive with clearness, that he had been a fool; but the twins, when he told them that evening that owing to technical difficulties, with the details of which he wouldn’t trouble them, the guardianship was off, were pleased.

“We want to be bound to you,” said Anna-Felicitas her eyes very soft and her voice very gentle, “only by ties of affection and gratitude.”

And Anna-Rose, turning red, opened her mouth as though she were going to say something handsome like that too, but seemed unable after all to get it out, and only said, rather inaudibly, “Yes.”

CHAPTER XXIV

Yet another harassing experience awaited Mr. Twist before the end of that week.

It had been from the first his anxious concern that nothing should occur at the Cosmopolitan to get his party under a cloud; yet it did get under a cloud, and on the very last afternoon, too, before Mrs. Bilton’s arrival.  Only twenty-four hours more and her snowy-haired respectability would have spread over the twins like a white whig.  They would have been safe.  His party would have been unassailable.  But no; those Twinklers, in spite of his exhortation whenever he had a minute left to exhort in, couldn’t, it seemed, refrain from twinkling,—­the word in Mr. Twist’s mind covered the whole of their easy friendliness, their flow of language, their affable desire to explain.

He had kept them with him as much as he could, and luckily the excited interest they took in the progress of the inn made them happy to hang about it most of the time of the delicate and dangerous week before Mrs. Bilton came; but they too had things to do,—­shopping in Acapulco choosing the sea-blue linen frocks and muslin caps and aprons in which they were to wait at tea, and buying the cushions and flower-pots and canary that came under the general heading, in Anna-Rose’s speech, of feminine touches.  So they sometimes left him; and he never saw them go without a qualm.

“Mind and not say anything to anybody about this, won’t you,” he would say hastily, making a comprehensive gesture towards the cottage as they went.