“No,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “He didn’t come again for a long while, and when he did there was no follow left in him.  Quite the contrary.”

Mr. Twist listened with the more interest to this story because it was the first time Anna-Felicitas had talked since he knew her.  He was used to the inspiriting and voluble conversation of Anna-Rose who had looked upon him as her best friend since the day he had wiped up her tears; but Anna-Felicitas had been too unwell to talk.  She had uttered languid and brief observations from time to time with her eyes shut and her head lolling loosely on her neck, but this was the first time she had been, as it were, an ordinary human being, standing upright on her feet, walking about, looking intelligently if pensively at the scenery, and in a condition of affable readiness, it appeared, to converse.

Mr. Twist was a born mother.  The more trouble he was given the more attached he became.  He had rolled Anna-Felicitas up in rugs so often that to be not going to roll her up any more was depressing to him.  He was beginning to perceive this motherliness in him himself, and he gazed through his spectacles at Anna-Felicitas while she sketched the rise and fall of the follower, and wondered with an almost painful solicitude what her fate would be in the hands of the Clouston Sacks.

Equally he wondered as to the other one’s fate; for he could not think of one Twinkler without thinking of the other.  They were inextricably mixed together in the impression they had produced on him, and they dwelt together in his thoughts as one person called, generally, Twinklers.  He stood gazing at them, his motherly instincts uppermost, his hearty yearning over them now that the hour of parting was so near and his carefully tended chickens were going to be torn from beneath his wing.  Mr. Twist was domestic.  He was affectionate.  He would have loved, though he had never known it, the sensation of pattering feet about his house, and small hands clinging to the apron he would never wear.  And it was entirely characteristic of him that his invention, the invention that brought him his fortune, should have had to do with a teapot.

But if his heart was uneasy within him at the prospect of parting from his charges their hearts were equally uneasy, though not in the same way.  The very name of Clouston K. Sack was repugnant to Anna-Rose; and Anna-Felicitas, less quick at disliking, turned it over cautiously in her mind as one who turns over an unknown and distasteful object with the nose of his umbrella.  Even she couldn’t quite believe that any good thing could come out of a name like that, especially when it had got into their lives through Uncle Arthur.  Mr. Twist had never heard of the Clouston Sacks, which made Anna-Rose still more distrustful.  She wasn’t in the least encouraged when he explained the bigness of America and that nobody in it ever knew everybody—­she just said that everybody had heard of Mr. Roosevelt, and her heart was too doubtful within her even to mind being told, as he did immediately tell her within ear-shot of Anna-Felicitas, that her reply was unreasonable.