Just at the end, as they were all three straining their eyes, no one with more anxiety than Mr. Twist, to try and guess which of the crowd on the landing-stage were the Clouston Sacks, they passed on their other side the Vaterland, the great interned German liner at its moorings, and the young man who had previously been so very familiar, as Anna-Rose said, but who was only, Mr. Twist explained, being American, came hurrying boldly up.

“You mustn’t miss this,” he said to Anna-Felicitas, actually seizing her by the arm.  “Here’s something that’ll make you feel home-like right away.”

And he led her off, and would have dragged her off but for Anna-Felicitas’s perfect non-resistance.

“He is being familiar,” said Anna-Rose to Mr. Twist, turning very red and following quickly after him.  “That’s not just being American.  Everybody decent knows that if there’s any laying hold of people’s arms to be done one begins with the eldest sister.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t realize that you are the elder,” said Mr. Twist.  “Strangers judge, roughly, by size.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have trouble with her,” said Anna-Rose, not heeding his consolations.  “It isn’t a sinecure, I assure you, being left sole guardian and protector of somebody as pretty as all that.  And the worst of it is she’s going on getting prettier.  She hasn’t nearly come to the end of what she can do in that direction.  I see it growing on her.  Every Sunday she’s inches prettier than she was the Sunday before.  And wherever I take her to live, and however out of the way it is, I’m sure the path to our front door is going to be black with suitors.”

This dreadful picture so much perturbed her, and she looked up at Mr. Twist with such worried eyes, that he couldn’t refrain from patting her on her shoulder.

“There, there,” said Mr. Twist, and he begged her to be sure to let him know directly she was in the least difficulty, or even perplexity,—­“about the suitors, for instance, or anything else.  You must let me be of some use in the world, you know,” he said.

“But we shouldn’t like it at all if we thought you were practising being useful on us,” said Anna-Rose “It’s wholly foreign to our natures to enjoy being the objects of anybody’s philanthropy.”

“Now I just wonder where you get all your long words from,” said Mr. Twist soothingly; and Anna-Rose laughed, and there was only one dimple in the Twinkler family and Anna-Rose had got it.

“What do you want to get looking at that for?” she asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd staring at the Vaterland, and got to where Anna-Felicitas stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang the young man was treating her to,—­that terse, surprising, swift hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was hearing in such abundance for the first time.