Anger, jealousy, anxiety, sense of responsibility and mortification, all tumbled about furiously together inside Mr. Twist as he leaned against the bookcase and gazed down at Anna-Felicitas, who for her part was gazing beatifically into space; but through the anger, and the jealousy, and the anxiety, and the sense of responsibility and mortification one great thought was struggling, and it finally pushed every other aside and got out to the top of the welter:  here, in the chair before him, he beheld his sister-in-law.  So much at least was cleared up.

He crossed to the bureau and dragged his office-stool over next to her and sat down.  “So that’s it, is it?” he said, trying to speak very calmly, but his face pulled all sorts of ways, as it had so often been since the arrival in his life of the twins.

“Yes,” she said, coming out of her contemplation.  “It’s love at last.”

“I don’t know about at last.  Whichever way you look at it, Anna II., that don’t seem to hit it off as a word.  What I meant was, it’s Elliott.”

“Yes,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “Which is the same thing.  I believe,” she added, “I now have to allude to him as John.”

Mr. Twist made another effort to speak calmly.  “You don’t,” he said, “think it at all unusual or undesirable that you should be calling a man John to-day of whom you’d never heard yesterday.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Anna-Felicitas beaming.

“It doesn’t strike you in any way as imprudent to be so hasty.  It doesn’t strike you as foolish.”

“On the contrary,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “I can’t help thinking I’ve been very clever.  I shouldn’t have thought it of myself.  You see, I’m not naturally quick.”  And she beamed with what she evidently regarded as a pardonable pride.

“It doesn’t strike you as even a little—­well, a little improper.”

“On the contrary,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “Aunt Alice told us that the one man one could never be improper about, even if one tried, was one’s husband.”

“Husband?” Mr. Twist winced.  He loved, as we have seen, the word wife, but then that was different.

“It’s not time yet to talk of husbands,” he said, full of a flaming unreasonableness and jealousy and the sore feeling that he who had been toiling so long and so devotedly in the heat of the Twinkler sun had had a most unfair march stolen on him by this eleventh-hour stranger.

He flamed with unreasonableness.  Yet he knew this was the solution of half his problem,—­and of much the worst half, for it was after all Anna-Felicitas who had produced the uncomfortable feeling of slipperiness, of eels; Anna-Rose had been quite good, sitting in a chair crying and just so sweetly needing comfort.  But now that the solution was presented to him he was full of fears.  For on what now could he base his proposal to Anna-Rose?  Elliott would be the legitimate protector of both the Twinklers.  Mr.