The lane up to the inn was in its middle-day emptiness and somnolence.  Where Anna-Felicitas and Elliott had been sitting cool and shaded when he passed before, there was only the pressed-down grass and crushed flowers in a glare of sun.  She had gone home long ago of course.  She said she was going to be very busy.  Secretly he wished she hadn’t gone home, and that little Christopher too might for a bit be somewhere else, so that when he arrived he wouldn’t immediately have to face everybody at once.  He wanted to think; he wanted to have time to think; time before four o’clock came, and with four o’clock, if he hadn’t come to any conclusion about shutting up the inn—­and how could he if nobody gave him time to think?—­those accursed, swarming Germans.  It was they who had done all this.  Mr. Twist blazed into sudden fury.  They and their blasted war....

At the gate stood Anna-Rose.  Her face looked quite pale in the green shade of the tunnelled-out syringa bushes.  She as peering out down the lane watching him approach.  This was awful, thought Mr. Twist.  At the very gate one of them.  Confronted at once.  No time, not a minute’s time given him to think.

“Oh,” cried out Anna-Rose the instant he pulled up, for she had waved to him to stop when he tried to drive straight on round to the stable, “she isn’t with you?”

“Who isn’t?” asked Mr. Twist.

Anna-Rose became paler than ever.  “She has been kidnapped,” she said.

“How’s that?” said Mr. Twist, staring at her from the car.

“Kidnapped,” repeated Anna-Rose, with wide-open horror-stricken eyes; for from her nursery she carried with her at the bottom of her mind, half-forgotten but ready to fly up to the top at any moment of panic, an impression that the chief activities and recreations of all those Americans who weren’t really good were two:  they lynched, and they kidnapped.  They lynched you if they didn’t like you enough, and if they liked you too much they kidnapped you.  Anna-Felicitas, exquisite and unsuspecting, had been kidnapped.  Some American’s concupiscent eye had alighted on her, observed her beauty, and marked her down.  No other explanation was possible of a whole morning’s absence from duties of one so conscientious and painstaking as Anna-Felicitas.  She never shirked; that is, she never had been base enough to shirk alone.  If there was any shirking to be done they had always done it together.  As the hours passed and she didn’t appear, Anna-Rose had tried to persuade herself that she must have motored into Acapulco with Mr. Twist, strange and unnatural and reprehensible and ignoble as such arch shirking would have been; and now that the car had come back empty except for Mr. Twist she was convinced the worst had happened—­her beautiful, her precious Columbus had been kidnapped.

“Kidnapped,” she said again, wringing her hands.

Mr. Twist was horror-struck too, for he thought she was announcing the kidnapping of Mrs. Bilton.  Somehow he didn’t think of Anna-Felicitas; he had seen her too recently.  But that Mrs. Bilton should be kidnapped seemed to him to touch the lowest depths of American criminal enterprise and depravity.  At the same time though he recoiled before this fresh blow a thought did fan through his mind with a wonderful effect of coolness and silence,—­“Then they’ll gag her,” he said.