e motionlessness, and silence, and mist gave them
a sensation of being hung mid-air in some strange empty Hades between
two worlds.

Far down below there was a faint splash every now and then against the
side of the _St. Luke_ when some other steamer, invisible in the mist,
felt her way slowly by. Out ahead lay the sea, the immense uneasy sea
that was to last ten days and nights before they got to the other side,
hour after hour of it, hour after hour of tossing across it further and
further away; and forlorn and ghostly as the ship felt, it yet, because
on either side of it were still the shores of England, didn't seem as
forlorn and ghostly as the unknown land they were bound for. For
suppose, Anna-Felicitas inquired of Anna-Rose, who had been privately
asking herself the same thing, America didn't like them? Suppose the
same sort of difficulties were waiting for them over there that had
dogged their footsteps in England?

"First of all," said Anna-Rose promptly, for she prided herself on the
readiness and clearness of her explanations, "America will like us,
because I don't see why it shouldn't. We're going over to it in exactly
the same pleasant spirit, Anna-F.,--and don't you go forgetting it and
showing your disagreeable side--that the dove was in when it flew across
the waters to the ark, and with olive branches in our beaks just the
same as the dove's, only they're those two letters to Uncle Arthur's
friends."

"But do you think Uncle Arthur's friends--" began Anna-Felicitas, who
had great doubts as to everything connected with Uncle Arthur.

"And secondly," continued Anna-Rose a little louder, for she wasn't
going to be interrupted, and having been asked a question liked to give
all the information in her power, "secondly, America is the greatest of
the neutrals except the _liebe Gott_, and is bound particularly to
prize us because we're so unusually and peculiarly neutral. What ever was
more neutral than you and me? We're neither one thing nor the other, and
yet at the same time we're both." Anna-Felicitas remarked that it sounded
rather as if they were the Athanasian Creed.

"And thirdly," went on Anna-Rose, waving this aside, "there's L200
waiting for us over there, which is a very nice warm thing to think of.
We never had L200 waiting for us anywhere in our lives before, did
we,--so you remember that, and don't get grumbling."

Anna-Felicitas mildly said that she wasn't grumbling but that she
couldn'