“Can you please tell us why we’re stopping?” Anna-Rose inquired of her politely, leaning forward to catch her attention as she hurried by.

The stewardess allowed her roving eye to alight for a moment on the two objects beneath the rug.  Their chairs were close together, and the rug covered them both up to their chins.  Over the top of it their heads appeared, exactly alike as far as she could see in the dusk; round heads, each with a blue knitted cap pulled well over its ears, and round eyes staring at her with what anybody except the stewardess would have recognized as a passionate desire for some sort of reassurance.  They might have been seven instead of seventeen for all the stewardess could tell.  They looked younger than anything she had yet seen sitting alone on a deck and asking questions.  But she was an exasperated widow, who had never had children and wasn’t to be touched by anything except a tip, besides despising, because she was herself a second-class stewardess, all second-class passengers,—­“As one does,” Anna-Rose explained later on to Anna-Felicitas, “and the same principle applies to Jews.”  So she said with an acidity completely at variance with the promise of her cap, “Ask the Captain,” and disappeared.

The twins looked at each other.  They knew very well that captains on ships were mighty beings who were not asked questions.

“She’s trifling with us,” murmured Anna-Felicitas.

“Yes,” Anna-Rose was obliged to admit, though the thought was repugnant to her that they should look like people a stewardess would dare trifle with.

“Perhaps she thinks we’re younger than we are,” she said after a silence.

“Yes.  She couldn’t see how long our dresses are, because of the rug.”

“No.  And it’s only that end of us that really shows we’re grown up.”

“Yes.  She ought to have seen us six months ago.”

Indeed she ought.  Even the stewardess would have been surprised at the activities and complete appearance of the two pupae now rolled motionless in the rug.  For, six months ago, they had both been probationers in a children’s hospital in Worcestershire, arrayed, even as the stewardess, in spotless caps, hurrying hither and thither with trays of food, sweeping and washing up, learning to make beds in a given time, and be deft, and quick, and never tired, and always punctual.

This place had been got them by the efforts and influence of their Aunt Alice, that aunt who had given them the rug on their departure and who had omitted to celebrate their birthday.  She was an amiable aunt, but she didn’t understand about birthdays.  It was the first one they had had since they were complete orphans, and so they were rather sensitive about it.  But they hadn’t cried, because since their mother’s death they had done with crying.  What could there ever again be in the world bad enough to cry about after that?  And besides, just before she dropped away from them into