Then he recovered himself. "I'm very sorry to hear it, of course," he said briskly, picking himself up, as it were, from this sudden and unexpected tumble, "but I don't see that it matters to you so long as Mrs. Dellogg isn't dead too." "Yes, but--" began Anna-Rose. "Mr. Dellogg isn't _very_ dead, you see," said Anna-Felicitas. Mr. Twist looked from them to the driver, but finding no elucidation there and only disapproval, looked back again. "He isn't dead and settled _down_," said Anna-Rose. "Not _that_ sort of being dead," said Anna-Felicitas. "He's _just_ dead." "Just got to the stage when he has a funeral," said Anna-Rose. "His funeral, it seems, is imminent," said Anna-Felicitas. "Did you not give us to understand," she asked, turning to the driver, "that it was imminent?" "I don't know about imminent," said the driver, who wasn't going to waste valuable time with words like that, "but it's to-morrow." "And you see what that means for us," said Anna-Felicitas, turning to Mr. Twist. Mr. Twist did. He again wiped his forehead, but not this time because the night was hot. CHAPTER XX Manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into a house where there is going to be a funeral next day, even if one has come all the way from New York and has nowhere else to go. Equally manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into it after the funeral till a decent interval has elapsed. But what the devil, Mr. Twist asked himself in language become regrettably natural to him since his sojourn at the front, is a decent interval? This Mr. Twist asked himself late that night, pacing up and down the sea-shore in the warm and tranquil darkness in front of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, while the twins, utterly tired out by their journey and the emotions at the end of it, crept silently into bed. How long does it take a widow to recover her composure? Recover, that is, the first beginnings of it? At what stage in her mourning is it legitimate to intrude on her with reminders of obligations incurred before she was a widow,--with, in fact, the Twinklers? Delicacy itself would shrink from doing it under a week thought Mr. Twist, or even under a fortnight, or even if you came to that, under a month; and meanwhile what was he to do with the Twinklers?