scover America. All for ourselves."

It was Anna-Rosa who suggested their being Christopher and Columbus. She
was the elder by twenty minutes. Both had had their seventeenth
birthday--and what a birthday: no cake, no candles, no kisses and
wreaths and home-made poems; but then, as Anna-Felicitas pointed out, to
comfort Anna-Rose who was taking it hard, you can't get blood out of an
aunt--only a month before. Both were very German outside and very
English inside. Both had fair hair, and the sorts of chins Germans have,
and eyes the colour of the sky in August along the shores of the Baltic.
Their noses were brief, and had been objected to in Germany, where, if
you are a Junker's daughter, you are expected to show it in your nose.
Anna-Rose had a tight little body, inclined to the round.
Anna-Felicitas, in spite of being a twin, seemed to have made the most
of her twenty extra minutes to grow more in; anyhow she was tall and
thin, and she drooped; and having perhaps grown quicker made her eyes
more dreamy, and her thoughts more slow. And both held their heads up
with a great air of calm whenever anybody on the ship looked at them, as
who should say serenely, "We're _thoroughly_ happy, and having the time
of our lives."

For worlds they wouldn't have admitted to each other that they were even
aware of such a thing as being anxious or wanting to cry. Like other
persons of English blood, they never were so cheerful nor pretended to
be so much amused as when they were right down on the very bottom of
their luck. Like other persons of German blood, they had the squashiest
corners deep in their hearts, where they secretly clung to cakes and
Christmas trees, and fought a tendency to celebrate every possible
anniversary, both dead and alive.

The gulls, circling white against the gloomy sky over the rubbish that
floated on the Mersey, made them feel extraordinarily forlorn. Empty
boxes, bits of straw, orange-peel, a variety of dismal dirtiness lay
about on the sullen water; England was slipping away, England, their
mother's country, the country of their dreams ever since they could
remember--and the _St. Luke_ with a loud screech had suddenly stopped.

Neither of them could help jumping a little at that and getting an inch
closer together beneath the rug. Surely it wasn't a submarine already?

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, changing as it
were the unspoken conversation.

As the eldest she had a gr