"On the contrary," said Anna-Felicitas. "Aunt Alice told us that the one man one could never be improper about, even if one tried, was one's husband." "Husband?" Mr. Twist winced. He loved, as we have seen, the word wife, but then that was different. "It's not time yet to talk of husbands," he said, full of a flaming unreasonableness and jealousy and the sore feeling that he who had been toiling so long and so devotedly in the heat of the Twinkler sun had had a most unfair march stolen on him by this eleventh-hour stranger. He flamed with unreasonableness. Yet he knew this was the solution of half his problem,--and of much the worst half, for it was after all Anna-Felicitas who had produced the uncomfortable feeling of slipperiness, of eels; Anna-Rose had been quite good, sitting in a chair crying and just so sweetly needing comfort. But now that the solution was presented to him he was full of fears. For on what now could he base his proposal to Anna-Rose? Elliott would be the legitimate protector of both the Twinklers. Mr. Twist, who had been so much perturbed by the idea of having to propose to one or other twin, was miserably upset by the realization that now he needn't propose to either. Elliott had cut the ground from under his feet. He had indeed--what was the expression he used the evening before?--yes, nipped in. There was now no necessity for Anna-Rose to marry him, and Mr. Twist had an icy and forlorn feeling that on no other basis except necessity would she. He was thirty-five. It was all very well for Elliott to get proposing to people of seventeen; he couldn't be more than twenty-five. And it wasn't only age. Mr. Twist hadn't shaved before looking-glasses for nothing, and he was very distinctly aware that Elliott was extremely attractive. "It's not time yet to talk of husbands," he therefore hotly and jealously said. "On the contrary," said Anna-Felicitas gently, "it's not only time but war-time. The war, I have observed, is making people be quick and sudden about all sorts of things." "You haven't observed it. That's Elliott said that." "He may have," said Anna-Felicitas. "He said so many things--" And again she lapsed into contemplation; into, thought Mr. Twist as he gazed jealously at her profile, an ineffable, ruminating, reminiscent smugness. "See here, Anna II.," he said, finding it impossibly painful to wait while she contemplated, "suppose you don't at this particular crisis fall into quite so many ecstatic meditations. There isn't as much time as you seem to think." "No--and there's Christopher," said Anna-Felicitas, giving herself a shake, and with that slightly troubled look coming into her face again as of having, in spite of being an angel in glory, somehow got her feet wet. "Precisely," said Mr. Twist, getting up and walking about the room. "There's Christopher. Now Christopher, I should say, would be pretty well heart-broken over this."