“Not in the least,” agreed Anna-Felicitas.

“And if it hadn’t been for the submarine we shouldn’t have got to know him.  So you see,” said Anna-Rose,—­and again produced her favourite remark about good coming out of evil.

Those were the days in mid-Atlantic when England was lost in its own peculiar mists, and the sunshine of America was stretching out towards them.  The sea was getting calmer and bluer every hour, and submarines more and more unlikely.  If a ship could be pleasant, which Anna-Felicitas doubted, for she still found difficulty in dressing and undressing without being sea-sick and was unpopular in the cabin, this ship was pleasant.  You lay in a deck-chair all day long, staring at the blue sky and blue sea that enclosed you as if you were living in the middle of a jewel, and tried not to remember—­oh, there were heaps of things it was best not to remember; and when the rail of the ship moved up across the horizon too far into the sky, or moved down across it and showed too much water, you just shut your eyes and then it didn’t matter; and the sun shone warm and steady on your face, and the wind tickled the tassel on the top of your German-knitted cap, and Mr. Twist came and read aloud to you, which sent you to sleep quicker than anything you had ever known.

The book he read out of and carried about with him his pocket was called “Masterpieces You Must Master,” and was an American collection of English poetry, professing in its preface to be a Short Cut to Culture; and he would read with what at that time, it being new to them, seemed to the twins a strange exotic pronunciation, Wordsworth’s “Ode to Dooty,” and the effect was as if someone should dig a majestic Gregorian psalm in its ribs, and make it leap and giggle.

Anna-Rose, who had no reason to shut her eyes, for she didn’t mind what the ship’s rail did with the horizon, opened them very round when first Mr. Twist started on his Masterpieces.  She was used to hearing them read by her mother in the adorable husky voice that sent such thrills through one, but she listened with the courtesy and final gratitude due to the efforts to entertain her of so amiable a friend, and only the roundness of her eyes showed her astonishment at this waltzing round, as it appeared to her, of Mr. Twist with the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God.  He also read “Lycidas” to her, that same “Lycidas” Uncle Arthur took for a Derby winner, and only Anna-Rose’s politeness enabled her to refrain from stopping up her ears.  As it was, she fidgeted to the point of having to explain, on Mr. Twist’s pausing to gaze at her questioningly through the smoke-coloured spectacles he wore on deck, which made him look so like a gigantic dragon-fly, that it was because her deck-chair was so very much harder than she was.