Far down below there was a faint splash every now and then against the side of the St. Luke when some other steamer, invisible in the mist, felt her way slowly by.  Out ahead lay the sea, the immense uneasy sea that was to last ten days and nights before they got to the other side, hour after hour of it, hour after hour of tossing across it further and further away; and forlorn and ghostly as the ship felt, it yet, because on either side of it were still the shores of England, didn’t seem as forlorn and ghostly as the unknown land they were bound for.  For suppose, Anna-Felicitas inquired of Anna-Rose, who had been privately asking herself the same thing, America didn’t like them?  Suppose the same sort of difficulties were waiting for them over there that had dogged their footsteps in England?

“First of all,” said Anna-Rose promptly, for she prided herself on the readiness and clearness of her explanations, “America will like us, because I don’t see why it shouldn’t.  We’re going over to it in exactly the same pleasant spirit, Anna-F.,—­and don’t you go forgetting it and showing your disagreeable side—­that the dove was in when it flew across the waters to the ark, and with olive branches in our beaks just the same as the dove’s, only they’re those two letters to Uncle Arthur’s friends.”

“But do you think Uncle Arthur’s friends—­” began Anna-Felicitas, who had great doubts as to everything connected with Uncle Arthur.

“And secondly,” continued Anna-Rose a little louder, for she wasn’t going to be interrupted, and having been asked a question liked to give all the information in her power, “secondly, America is the greatest of the neutrals except the liebe Gott, and is bound particularly to prize us because we’re so unusually and peculiarly neutral.  What ever was more neutral than you and me?  We’re neither one thing nor the other, and yet at the same time we’re both.”  Anna-Felicitas remarked that it sounded rather as if they were the Athanasian Creed.

“And thirdly,” went on Anna-Rose, waving this aside, “there’s L200 waiting for us over there, which is a very nice warm thing to think of.  We never had L200 waiting for us anywhere in our lives before, did we,—­so you remember that, and don’t get grumbling.”

Anna-Felicitas mildly said that she wasn’t grumbling but that she couldn’t help thinking what a great deal depended on the goodwill of Uncle Arthur’s friends, and wished it had been Aunt Alice’s friends they had letters to instead, because Aunt Alice’s friends were more likely to like her.

Anna-Rose rebuked her, and said that the proper spirit in which to start on a great adventure was one of faith and enthusiasm, and that one didn’t have doubts.