In this village Mrs. Twist had lived since her marriage, full of dignity and honour.  As a wife she had been full of it, for the elder Mr. Twist had been good even when alive, and as a widow she had been still fuller, for the elder Mr. Twist positively improved by being dead.  Not a breath had ever touched her and her children.  Not the most daring and distrustful Clark mind had ever thought of her except respectfully.  And now here was this happening to her; at her age; when she was least able to bear it.

She sat in silence, staring with sombre eyes at the three figures.

“Mother—­” began Edward again; but was again interrupted by the twins, who said together, as they had now got into the habit of saying when confronted by silent and surprised Americans, “We’ve come.”

It wasn’t that they thought it a particularly good conversational opening, it was because silence and surprise on the part of the other person seemed to call for explanation on theirs, and they were constitutionally desirous of giving all the information in their power.

“How do you do,” they then repeated, loosening themselves from Mr. Twist and advancing down the room with outstretched hands.

Mr. Twist came with them.  “Mother,” he said, “these are the Twinkler girls.  Their name’s Twinkler.  They—–­”

Freed as he felt he was from his old bonds, determined as he felt he was on emulating the perfect candour and simplicity of the twins and the perfect candour and simplicity of his comrades in France, his mother’s dead want of the smallest reaction to this announcement tripped him up for a moment and prevented his going on.

But nothing ever prevented the twins going on.  If they were pleased and excited they went on with cheerful gusto, and if they were unnerved and frightened they still went on,—­perhaps even more volubly, anxiously seeking cover behind a multitude of words.

Mrs. Twist had not yet unnerved and frightened them, because they were too much delighted that they had got to her at all.  The relief Anna-Rose experienced at having safely piloted that difficult craft, the clumsy if adorable Columbus, into a respectable Port was so immense that it immediately vented itself in words of warmest welcome to the lady in the chair to her own home.

“We’re so glad to see you here,” she said, smiling till her dimple seemed to be everywhere at once hardly able to refrain from giving the lady a welcome hug instead of just inhospitably shaking her hand.  She couldn’t even shake her hand, however, because it still held, immovably, the fork.  “It would have been too awful,” Anna-Rose therefore finished, putting the heartiness of the handshake she wanted to give into her voice instead, “if you had happened to have run away too.”