Miss Heap was so enigmatic, she who was naturally of an unquiet and exercise-loving tongue, that this graver, more occupied section of the inhabitants was instantly as much pervaded by suspicions as the idlest of the visitors in the hotels and country houses.  It waved aside the innocent appearance and obvious extreme youth of the suspects.  Useless to look like cherubs if it were German cherubs you looked like.  Useless being very nearly children if it were German children you very nearly were.  Why, precisely these qualities would be selected by those terribly clever Germans for the furtherance of their nefarious schemes.  It would be quite in keeping with the German national character, that character of bottomless artfulness, to pick out two such young girls with just that type of empty, baby face, and send them over to help weave the gigantic invisible web with which America was presently to be choked dead.

The serious section of Acapulco, the section that thought, hit on this explanation of the Twinklers with no difficulty whatever once its suspicions were roused because it was used to being able to explain everything instantly.  It was proud of its explanation, and presented it to the town with much the same air of deprecating but conscious achievement with which one presents drinking-fountains.

Then there was the lawyer to whom Mr. Twist had gone about the guardianship.  He said nothing, but he was clear in his mind that the girls were German and that Mr. Twist wanted to hide it.  He had thought more highly of Mr. Twist’s intelligence than this.  Why hide it?  America was a neutral country; technically she was neutral, and Germans could come and go as they pleased.  Why unnecessarily set tongues wagging?  He did not, being of a continuous shrewd alertness himself, a continuous wide-awakeness and minute consideration of consequences, realize, and if he had he wouldn’t have believed, the affectionate simplicity and unworldliness of Mr. Twist.  If it had been pointed out to him he would have dismissed it as a pose; for a man who makes money in any quantity worth handling isn’t affectionately simple and unworldly—­he is calculating and steely.

The lawyer was puzzled.  How did Mr. Twist manage to have a forehead and a fortune like that, and yet be a fool?  True, he had a funny sort of face on him once you got down to the nose part and what came after,—­a family sort of face, thought the lawyer; a sort of rice pudding, wet-nurse face.  The lawyer listened intently to all the talk and rumours, while himself saying nothing.  In spite of being a married man, his scruples about honour hadn’t been blunted by the urge to personal freedom and the necessity for daily self-defence that sometimes afflicts those who have wives.  He remained honourably silent, as he had said he would, but he listened; and he came to the conclusion that either there was a quite incredible amount of stupidity about the Twist party, or that there was something queer.