dressed gurls, well-cared for gurls.  Daughters of decent people.  Here you come all this way, I guess sent by your parents to represent them properly, and properly fitted out in nice black clothes and all, and you start making fun.  Pretending.  Playing kind of hide-and-seek with me about the funeral.  Messing me up in a lot of words.  I don’t like it.  I’m a father myself, and I don’t like it.  I don’t like to see daughters going on like this when their father ain’t looking.  It don’t seem decent to me.  But I suppose you Easterners—­”

The twins, however, were not listening.  They were looking at each other in dismay.  How extraordinary, how terrible, the way Uncle Arthur’s friends gave out.  They seemed to melt away at one’s mere approach.  People who had been living with their husbands all their lives ran away just as the twins came on the scene; people who had been alive all their lives went and died, also at that very moment.  It almost seemed as if directly anybody knew that they, the Twinklers, were coming to stay with them they became bent on escape.  They could only look at each other in stricken astonishment at this latest blow of Fate.  They heard no more of what the driver said.  They could only sit and look at each other.

And then Mr. Twist came hurrying across from the baggage office, wiping his forehead, for the night was hot.  Behind him came the porter, ruefully balancing the piled-up grips on his truck.

“I’m sorry to have been so—­” began Mr. Twist, smiling cheerfully:  but he stopped short in his sentence and left off smiling when he saw the expression in the four eyes fixed on him.  “What has happened?” he asked quickly.

“Only what we might have expected,” said Anna-Rose.

“Mr. Dellogg’s dead,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“You don’t say,” said Mr. Twist; and after a pause he said again, “You don’t say.”

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.