“No—­from the station,” panted Anna-Rose.

“We didn’t see any village,” panted Anna-Felicitas.

“We want Mr. Twist please,” said Anna-Rose struggling with her breath.

Amanda eyed them.  “Having supper,” she said curtly.

“Fortunate creature,” gasped Anna-Felicitas, “I hope he isn’t eating it all.”

“Will you announce us please?” said Anna-Rose putting on her dignity.  “The Miss Twinklers.”

“The who?” said Amanda.

“The Miss Twinklers,” said Anna-Rose, putting on still more dignity, for there was that in Amanda’s manner which roused the Junker in her.

“Can’t disturb him at supper,” said Amanda briefly.

“I assure you,” said Anna-Felicitas, with the earnestness of conviction, “that he’ll like it.  I think I can undertake to promise he’ll show no resentment whatever.”

Amanda half shut the door.

“We’ll come in please,” said Anna-Rose, inserting herself into what was left of the opening.  “Will you kindly bear in mind that we’re totally unaccustomed to the doorstep?”

Amanda, doubtful, but unpractised in such a situation, permitted herself, in spite of having as she well knew the whole of free and equal America behind her, to be cowed.  Well, perhaps not cowed, but taken aback.  It was the long words and the awful politeness that did it.  She wasn’t used to beautiful long words like that, except on Sundays when the clergyman read the prayers in church, and she wasn’t used to politeness.  That so much of it should come out of objects so young rendered Amanda temporarily dumb.

She wavered with the door.  Instantly Anna-Rose slipped through it; instantly Anna-Felicitas followed her.

“Kindly tell your master the Miss Twinklers have arrived,” said Anna-Rose, looking every inch a Junker.  There weren’t many inches of Anna-Rose, but every one of them at that moment, faced by Amanda’s want of discipline, was sheer Junker.

Amanda, who had never met a Junker in her happy democratic life, was stirred into bristling emotion by the word master.  She was about to fling the insult of it from her by an impetuous and ill-considered assertion that if he was her master she was his mistress and so there now, when the bell which had rung once already since they had been standing parleying rang again and more impatiently, and the dining-room door opened and a head appeared.  The twins didn’t know that it was Edith’s head, but it was.

“Amanda—­” began Edith, in the appealing voice that was the nearest she ever dared get to rebuke without Amanda giving notice; but she stopped on seeing what, in the dusk of the hall, looked like a crowd.  “Oh—­” said Edith, taken aback.  “Oh—­” And was for withdrawing her head and shutting the door.

But the twins advanced towards her and the stream of light shining behind her and the agreeable smell streaming past her, with outstretched hands.