Even at that moment Miss Heap unconsciously felt that to let the Twinklers go would be to lose thrills.  And she was really thrilled.  She prickled with excitement and horror.  Her circulation hadn’t been so good for years.  She wasn’t one to dissect her feelings, so she had no idea of how thoroughly she was enjoying herself.  And it was while she sat alone in her bedroom, her fingers clasping and unclasping the arms of her chair, her feet nervously nibbing up and down on the thick soft carpet, hesitating as to the best course for her to take, holding her knowledge meanwhile tight, hugging it for a little altogether to herself, her very own, shared as yet by no one,—­it was while she sat there, that people out of doors in Acapulco itself, along the main roads, out in the country towards Zamora on the north and San Blas on the south, became suddenly aware of new signposts.

They hadn’t been there the day before.  They all turned towards the spot at the foot of the mountains where Pepper Lane was.  They all pointed, with a long white finger, in that direction.  And on them all was written in plain, sea-blue letters, beneath which the distance in miles or fractions of a mile was clearly marked, To The Open Arms.

Curiosity was roused at last.  People meeting each other in Main Street stopped to talk about these Arms wondered where and what they were, and decided to follow the signposts that afternoon in their cars and track them down.  They made up parties to go and track together.  It would be a relief to have something a little different to do.  What on earth could The Open Arms be?  Hopes were expressed that they weren’t something religious.  Awful to follow signposts out into the country only to find they landed you in a meeting-house.

At lunch in the hotels, and everywhere where people were together, the signposts were discussed.  Miss Heap heard them being discussed from her solitary table, but was so much taken up with her own exciting thoughts that she hardly noticed.  After lunch, however, as she was passing out of the restaurant, still full of her unshared news and still uncertain as to whom she should tell it first, Mr. Ridding called out from his table and said he supposed she was going too.

They had been a little chilly to each other since the afternoon of the conversation with the Twinklers, but he would have called out to any one at that moment.  He was sitting waiting while Mrs. Ridding finished her lunch, his own lunch finished long ago, and was in the condition of muffled but extreme exasperation which the unoccupied watching of Mrs. Ridding at meals produced.  Every day three times this happened, that Mr. Ridding got through his meal first by at least twenty minutes and then sat trying not to mind Mrs. Ridding.  She wasn’t aware of these efforts.  They would greatly have shocked her; for to try not to mind one’s wife surely isn’t what decent, loving husbands ever have to do.