“These Sacks,” remarked Anna-Felicitas patiently at last, when it was finally plain that there weren’t any, “don’t seem to have acquired the meeting habit.”

“No,” said Anna-Rose, vexed but relieved.  “They’re like what Aunt Alice used to complain about the housemaids,—­neither punctual nor methodical.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “They shall not escape us.  I’m getting quite hungry for the Sacks as a result of not having them.  We will now proceed to track them to their lair.”

For one instant Anna-Rose looked longingly at the train.  It was still there.  It was going on further and further away from the Sacks.  Happy train.  One little jump, and they’d be in it again.  But she resisted, and engaged a porter.

Even as soon as this the twins were far less helpless than they had been the day before.  The Sack address was in Anna-Rose’s hand, and they knew what an American porter looked like.  The porter and a taxi were engaged with comparative ease and assurance, and on giving the porter, who had staggered beneath the number of their grips, a dime, and seeing a cloud on his face, they doubled it instantly sooner than have trouble, and trebled it equally quickly on his displaying yet further dissatisfaction, and they departed for the Sacks, their grips piled up round them in the taxi as far as their chins, congratulating themselves on how much easier it was to get away from a train than to get into one.

But the minute their activities were over and they had time to think, silence fell upon them again.  They were both nervous.  They both composed their faces to indifference to hide that they were nervous, examining the streets they passed through with a calm and blase stare worthy of a lorgnette.  It was the tact part of the coming encounter that was chiefly unnerving Anna-Rose, and Anna-Felicitas was dejected by her conviction that nobody who was a friend of Uncle Arthur’s could possibly be agreeable.  “By their friends ye shall know them,” thought Anna-Felicitas, staring out of the window at the Boston buildings.  Also the persistence of the Sacks in not being on piers and railway stations was discouraging.  There was no eagerness about this persistence; there wasn’t even friendliness.  Perhaps they didn’t like her and Anna-Rose being German.

This was always the twins’ first thought when anybody wasn’t particularly cordial.  Their experiences in England had made them a little jumpy.  They were conscious of this weak spot, and like a hurt finger it seemed always to be getting in the way and being knocked.  Anna-Felicitas once more pondered on the inscrutable behaviour of Providence which had led their mother, so safely and admirably English, to leave that blessed shelter and go and marry somebody who wasn’t.  Of course there was this to be said for it, that she wasn’t their mother then.  If she had been, Anna-Felicitas felt sure she wouldn’t have.  Then, perceiving that her thoughts were getting difficult to follow she gave them up, and slid her hand through Anna-Rose’s arm and gave it a squeeze.