Mr. Twist’s income was anything between sixty and seventy thousand pounds a year by the time the war broke out.  Having invented and patented the simple device that kept the table-cloths of America, and indeed of Europe, spotless, all he had to do was to receive his percentages; sit still, in fact, and grow richer.  But so much had he changed since his adolescence that he preferred to stick to his engineering and his office in New York rather than go home and be happy with his mother.

She could not understand this behaviour in Edward.  She understood his behaviour still less when he went off to France in 1915, himself equipping and giving the ambulance he drove.

For a year his absence, and the dangers he was running, divided Mrs. Twist’s sorrows into halves.  Her position as a widow with an only son in danger touched the imagination of Clark, and she was never so much called upon as during this year.  Now Edward was coming home for a rest, and there was a subdued flutter about her, rather like the stirring of the funeral plumes on the heads of hearse-horses.

While he was crossing the Atlantic and Red-Crossing the Twinklers—­this was one of Anna-Felicitas’s epigrams and she tried Anna-Rose’s patience severely by asking her not once but several times whether she didn’t think it funny, whereas Anna-Rose disliked it from the first because of the suggestion it contained that Mr. Twist regarded what he did for them as works of mercy—­while Mr. Twist was engaged in these activities, at his home in Clark all the things Edith could think of that he used most to like to eat were being got ready.  There was an immense slaughtering of chickens, and baking and churning.  Edith, who being now the head servant of many instead of three was more than double as hard-worked as she used to be, was on her feet those last few days without stopping.  And she had to go and meet Edward in New York as well.  Whether Mrs. Twist feared that he might not come straight home or whether it was what she said it was, that dear Edward must not be the only person on the boat who had no one to meet him, is not certain; what is certain is that when it came to the point, and Edith had to start, Mrs. Twist had difficulty in maintaining her usual brightness.

Edith would be a whole day away, and perhaps a night if the St. Luke got in late, for Clark is five hours’ train journey from New York, and during all that time Mrs. Twist would be uncared for.  She thought Edith surprisingly thoughtless to be so much pleased to go.  She examined her flat and sinewy form with disapproval when she came in hatted and booted to say good-bye.  No wonder nobody married Edith.  And the money wouldn’t help her either now—­she was too old.  She had missed her chances, poor thing.

Mrs. Twist forgot the young man there had been once, years before, when Edward was still in the school room, who had almost married Edith.  He was a lusty and enterprising young man, who had come to Clark to stay with a neighbour, and he had had nothing to do through a long vacation, and had taken to dropping in at all hours and interrupting Edith in her housekeeping; and Edith, even then completely flat but of a healthy young uprightness and bright of eyes and hair, had gone silly and forgotten how to cook, and had given her mother, who surely had enough sorrows already, an attack of indigestion.