“Well, I was about to,” said Mr. Twist, suddenly soothed, “but you’re so calm—­”

“Of course I’m calm.  I’m a quietly married man.”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”

“Everything.  For some dispositions, everything.  Mine is one.  Yours is another.”

“Well, I guess I’ve not come here to talk about marriage.  What I want to know is why—­”

“Quite so,” said the lawyer, as he stopped.  “And I can tell you.  It’s because your inn is suspected of being run in the interests of the German Government.”

A deep silence fell upon the room.  The lawyer watched Mr. Twist with a detached and highly intelligent interest.  Mr. Twist stared at the lawyer, his kind, lavish lips fallen apart.  Anger had left him.  This blow excluded anger.  There was only room in him for blank astonishment.

“You know about my teapot?” he said at last.

“Try me again, Mr. Twist.”

“It’s on every American breakfast table.”

“Including my own.”

“They wouldn’t use it if they thought—­”

“My dear sir, they’re not going to,” said the lawyer.  “They’re proposing, among other little plans for conveying the general sentiment to your notice, to boycott the teapot.  It is to be put on an unofficial black list.  It is to be banished from the hotels.”

Mr. Twist’s stare became frozen.  The teapot boycotted?  The teapot his mother and sister depended on and The Open Arms depended on, and all his happiness, and the twins?  He saw the rumour surging over America in great swift waves, that the proceeds of the Twist Non-Trickler were used for Germany.  He saw—­but what didn’t he see in that moment of submerged horror?  Then he seemed to come to the surface again and resume reason with a gasp.  “Why?” he asked.

“Why they’re wanting to boycott the teapot?”

“No.  Why do they think the inn—­”

“The Miss Twinklers are German.”

“Half.”

“The half that matters—­begging my absent wife’s pardon.  I know all about that, you see.  You started me off thinking them over by that ward notion of yours.  It didn’t take me long.  It was pretty transparent.  So transparent that my opinion of the intelligence of my fellow-townsfolk has considerably lowered.  But we live in unbalanced times.  I guess it’s women at the bottom of this.  Women got on to it first, and the others caught the idea as they’d catch scarlet fever.  It’s a kind of scarlet fever, this spy scare that’s about.  Mind you, I admit the germs are certainly present among us.”  And the lawyer smiled.  He thought he saw he had made a little joke in that last remark.

Mr. Twist was not in the condition to see jokes, and didn’t smile.  “Do you mean to say those children—­” he began.

“They’re not regarded as children by any one except you.”

“Well, if they’re not,” said Mr. Twist, remembering the grass by the wayside in the lane and what he had so recently met in it, “I guess I’d best be making tracks.  But I know better.  And so would you if you’d seen them on the boat.  Why, twelve was putting their age too high on that boat.”