in Los Angeles she had certainly looked forward with a particular pleasure to two or three weeks’ delicious wallowing in flesh-pots for which she had not to pay.  She was also, however, a lady of grit; and she possessed, as she said her friends often told her, a redoubtable psyche, a genuine American free and fearless psyche; so that when, talking ceaselessly, her thoughts eagerly jostling each other as they streamed through her brain to get first to the exit of her tongue, she caught her foot in some builder’s debris carelessly left on the path up to the cottage and received in this way positively her first intimation that this couldn’t be the Cosmopolitan, she did not, as a more timid female soul well might have, become alarmed and suppose that Mr. Twist, whom after all she didn’t know, had brought her to this solitary place for purposes of assassination, but stopped firmly just where she was, and turning her head in the darkness toward him said, “Now Mr. Twist, I’ll stand right here till you’re able to apply some sort of illumination to what’s at my feet.  I can’t say what it is I’ve walked against but I’m not going any further with this promenade till I can say.  And when you’ve thrown light on the subject perhaps you’ll oblige me with information as to where that hotel is I was told I was coming to.”

“Information?” cried Mr. Twist.  “Haven’t I been trying to give it you ever since I met you?  Haven’t I been trying to stop your getting out of the taxi till I’d fetched a lantern?  Haven’t I been trying to offer you my arm along the path—­”

“Then why didn’t you say so, Mr. Twist?” asked Mrs. Bilton.

“Say so!” cried Mr. Twist.

At that moment the flash of an electric torch was seen jerking up and down as the person carrying it ran toward them.  It was the electrical expert who, most fortunately, happened still to be about.

Mrs. Bilton welcomed him warmly, and taking his torch from him first examined what she called the location of her feet, then gave it back to him and put her hand through his arm.  “Now guide me to whatever it is has been substituted without my knowledge for that hotel,” she said; and while Mr. Twist went back to the taxi to deal with her grips, she walked carefully toward the shanty on the expert’s arm, expressing, in an immense number of words, the astonishment she felt at Mr. Twist’s not having told her of the disappearance of the Cosmopolitan from her itinerary.

The electrical expert tried to speak, but was drowned without further struggle.  Anna-Rose, unable to listen any longer without answering to the insistent inquiries as to why Mr. Twist had kept her in the dark, raised her voice at last and called out, “But he wanted to—­he wanted to all the time—­you wouldn’t listen—­you wouldn’t stop—­”

Mrs. Bilton did stop however when she got inside the shanty.  Her tongue and her feet stopped dead together.  The electrical expert had lit all the lanterns, and coming upon it in the darkness its lighted windows gave it a cheerful, welcoming look.  But inside no amount of light and bunches of pink geraniums could conceal its discomforts, its dreadful smallness; besides, pink geraniums, which the twins were accustomed to regard as precious, as things brought up lovingly in pots, were nothing but weeds to Mrs. Bilton’s experienced Californian eye.