matter between them and their Maker, and then one doesn’t mind so much; but they had been found out, and by Li Koo, their own servant.  It was intolerable.  All the blood of all the Twinklers, Junkers from time immemorial and properly sensitive to humiliation, surged within them.  They hadn’t felt so naughty and so young for years.  They were sure Li Koo didn’t believe them about the ditch.  They had a dreadful sensation of being led back to Mrs. Bilton by the ear.

If only they could sack Mrs. Bilton!

This thought, immense and startling, came to Anna-Rose, who far more than Anna-Felicitas resented being cut off from Mr. Twist, besides being more naturally impetuous; and as they walked in silence side by side, with Li Koo a little ahead of them, she turned her head and looked at Anna-Felicitas.  “Let’s give her notice,” she murmured, under her breath.

Anna-Felicitas was so much taken aback that she stopped in her walk and stared at Anna-Rose’s flushed face.

She too hardly breathed it.  The suggestion seemed fantastic in its monstrousness.  How could they give anybody so old, so sure of herself, so determined as Mrs. Bilton, notice?

“Give her notice?” she repeated.

A chill ran down Anna-Felicitas’s spine.  Give Mrs. Bilton notice!  It was a great, a breath-taking idea, magnificent in its assertion of independence, of rights; but it needed, she felt, to be approached with caution.  They had never given anybody notice in their lives, and they had always thought it must be a most painful thing to do—­far, far worse than tipping.  Uncle Arthur usedn’t to mind it a bit; did it, indeed, with gusto.  But Aunt Alice hadn’t liked it at all, and came out in a cold perspiration and bewailed her lot to them and wished that people would behave and not place her in such a painful position.

Mrs. Bilton couldn’t be said not to have behaved.  Quite the contrary.  She had behaved too persistently; and they had to endure it the whole twenty-four hours.  For Mrs. Bilton had no turn, it appeared, in spite of what she had said at Los Angeles, for solitary contemplation, and after the confusion of the first night, when once she had had time to envisage the situation thoroughly, as she said, she had found that to sit alone downstairs in the uncertain light of the lanterns while the twins went to bed and Mr. Twist wouldn’t come out of his room, was not good for her psyche; so she had followed the twins upstairs, and continued to read the young girl’s diary to them during their undressing and till the noises coming from their beds convinced her that it was useless to go on any longer.  And that morning, the morning they hid in the ditch, she had even done this while they were getting up.

“It isn’t to be borne,” said Anna-Rose under her breath, one eye on Li Koo’s ear which, a little in front of her, seemed slightly slanted backward and sideways in the direction of her voice.  “And why should it be?  We’re not in her power.”