“Of course,” nodded Anna-Rose; but even she dropped her voice a little.  She peeped about among the bushes a moment, then put her mouth close to Anna-Felicitas’s ear, and whispered, “Stark.”

They stared at one another for a space with awe and horror in their eyes.

“You see,” then went on Anna-Rose rather quickly, hurrying away from the awful vision, “one knows one doesn’t have clothes in heaven because they don’t have the moth there.  It says so in the Bible.  And you can’t have the moth without having anything for it to go into.”

“Then they don’t have to have naphthalin either,” said Anna-Felicitas, “and don’t all have to smell horrid in the autumn when they take their furs out.”

“No.  And thieves don’t break in and steal either in heaven,” continued Anna-Rose, “and the reason why is that there isn’t anything to steal.”

“There’s angels,” suggested Anna-Felicitas after a pause, for she didn’t like to think there was nothing really valuable in heaven.

“Oh, nobody ever steals them,” said Anna-Rose.

Anna-Felicitas’s slow thoughts revolved round this new uncomfortable view of heaven.  It seemed, if Anna-Rose were right, and she always was right for she said so herself, that heaven couldn’t be such a safe place after all, nor such a kind place.  Thieves could break in and steal if they wanted to.  She had a proper horror of thieves.  She was sure the night would certainly come when they would break into her father’s Schloss, or, as her English nurse called it, her dear Papa’s slosh; and she was worried that poor Onkel Col should be being snubbed up there, and without anything to put on, which would make being snubbed so much worse, for clothes did somehow comfort one.

She took her worries to the nursemaid, and choosing a moment when she knew Anna-Rose wished to be unnoticed, it being her hour for inconspicuously eating unripe apples at the bottom of the orchard, an exercise Anna-Felicitas only didn’t indulge in because she had learned through affliction that her inside, fond and proud of it as she was, was yet not of that superior and blessed kind that suffers green apples gladly—­she sought out the nursemaid, whose name, too, confusingly, was Anna, and led the conversation up to heaven and the possible conditions prevailing in it by asking her to tell her, in strict confidence and as woman to woman, what she thought Onkel Col exactly looked like at that moment.

“Unrecognizable,” said the nursemaid promptly.

“Unrecognizable?” echoed Anna-Felicitas.

And the nursemaid, after glancing over her shoulder to see if the governess were nowhere in sight, told Anna-Felicitas the true story of Onkel Col’s end:  which is so bad that it isn’t fit to be put in any book except one with an appendix.

A stewardess passed just as Anna-Felicitas was asking Anna-Rose not to remind her of these grim portions of the past by calling her Col, a stewardess in such a very clean white cap that she looked both reliable and benevolent, while secretly she was neither.