“Your German Bible.  The bit about wenn die boesen Buben locken, so folge sie nicht.”

Anna-Felicitas continued to look blank, but Anna-Rose with a troubled brow said again, “You won’t go and forget that, will you, Anna F.?”

For Anna-Felicitas was very pretty.  In most people’s eyes she was very pretty, but in Anna-Rose’s she was the most exquisite creature God had yet succeeded in turning out.  Anna-Rose concealed this conviction from her.  She wouldn’t have told her for worlds.  She considered it wouldn’t have been at all good for her; and she had, up to this, and ever since they could both remember, jeered in a thoroughly sisterly fashion at her defects, concentrating particularly on her nose, on her leanness, and on the way, unless constantly reminded not to, she drooped.

But Anna-Rose secretly considered that the same nose that on her own face made no sort of a show at all, directly it got on to Anna-Felicitas’s somehow was the dearest nose; and that her leanness was lovely,—­the same sort of slender grace her mother had had in the days before the heart-breaking emaciation that was its last phase; and that her head was set so charmingly on her neck that when she drooped and forgot her father’s constant injunction to sit up,—­“For,” had said her father at monotonously regular intervals, “a maiden should be as straight as a fir-tree,”—­she only seemed to fall into even more attractive lines than when she didn’t.  And now that Anna-Rose alone had the charge of looking after this abstracted and so charming younger sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey to her while tactfully avoiding putting ideas into the poor child’s head which might make her conceited, that it behoved her to conduct herself with discretion.

But she found tact a ticklish thing, the most difficult thing of all to handle successfully; and on this occasion hers was so elaborate, and so carefully wrapped up in Scriptural language, and German Scripture at that, that Anna-Felicitas’s slow mind didn’t succeed in disentangling her meaning, and after a space of staring at her with a mild inquiry in her eyes, she decided that perhaps she hadn’t got one.  She was much too polite though, to say so, and they sat in silence under the rug till the St. Luke whistled and stopped, and Anna-Rose began hastily to make conversation about Christopher and Columbus.

She was ashamed of having shown so much of her woe at leaving England.  She hoped Anna-Felicitas hadn’t noticed.  She certainly wasn’t going on like that.  When the St. Luke whistled, she was ashamed that it wasn’t only Anna-Felicitas who jumped.  And the amount of brightness she put into her voice when she told Anna-Felicitas it was pleasant to go and discover America was such that that young lady, who if slow was sure, said to herself, “Poor little Anna-R., she’s really taking it dreadfully to heart.”