“Do you mean to say—­” Anna-Rose stopped with a catch of her breath.  “Do you mean,” she went on in an awe-struck voice, “that one of them—­one of them is dead?”

“Dead?  Bless you, no.  Anything but dead.  The exact opposite.  Gone.  Left.  Got,” said the boy.

“Oh,” said Anna-Rose greatly relieved, passing over his last word, whose meaning escaped her, “oh—­you mean just gone to meet us.  And missed us.  You see,” she said, turning to Anna-Felicitas, “they did try to after all.”

Anna-Felicitas said nothing, but reflected that whichever Sack had tried to must have a quite unusual gift for missing people.

“Gone to meet you?” repeated the boy, as one surprised by a new point of view.  “Well, I don’t know about that—­”

“We’ll go up and explain,” said Anna-Rose.  “Is it Mr. or Mrs. Clouston Sack who is here?”

“Mr.,” said the boy.

“Very well then.  Please bring in our things.”  And Anna-Rose proceeded, followed by Anna-Felicitas, to walk into the house.

The boy, instead of bringing them in, picked up the articles lying on the pavement and put them back again into the taxi.  “No hurry about them, I guess,” he said to the driver.  “Time enough to take them up when the gurls ask again—­” and he darted after the gurls to hand them over to his colleague who worked what he called the elevator.

“Why do you call it the elevator,” inquired Anna-Felicitas, mildly inquisitive, of this boy, who on hearing that they wished to see Mr. Sack stared at them with profound and unblinking interest all the way up, “when it is really a lift?”

“Because it is an elevator,” said the boy briefly.

“But we, you see,” said Anna-Felicitas, “are equally convinced that it’s a lift.”

The boy didn’t answer this.  He was as silent as the other one wasn’t; but there was a thrill about him too, something electric and tense.  He stared at Anna-Felicitas, then turned quickly and stared at Anna-Rose, then quickly back to Anna-Felicitas, and so on all the way up.  He was obviously extraordinarily interested.  He seemed to have got hold of an idea that had not struck the squib-like boy downstairs, who was entertaining the taxi-driver with descriptions of the domestic life of the Sacks.

The lift stopped at what the twins supposed was going to be the door of a landing or public corridor, but it was, they discovered, the actual door of the Sack flat.  At any moment the Sacks, if they wished to commit suicide, could do so simply by stepping out of their own front door.  They would then fall, infinitely far, on to the roof of the lift lurking at the bottom.

The lift-boy pressed a bell, the door opened, and there, at once exposed to the twins, was the square hall of the Sack flat with a manservant standing in it staring at them.

Obsessed by his idea, the lift-boy immediately stepped out of his lift, approached the servant, introduced his passengers to him by saying, “Young ladies to see Mr. Sack,” took a step closer, and whispered in his ear, but perfectly audibly to the twins who, however, regarded it as some expression peculiarly American and were left unmoved by it, “The co-respondents.”