 17 If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude's displeasure, her young endurance might have been put to a serious test. The days went by without his knocking at her father's door, and the time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn't conspicuously happened, to give it a new difference. What took place was a marked change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale. A change that somehow, even in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the day Maisie came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of what, at the same moment, had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir Claude. This was the real origin of her final perception, that though he didn't come to the house, her stepmother had some rare secret for not being quite without him. This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale, the promptest of which had been, not on Maisie's part, a wonderful outbreak of tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying creature. She hadn't cried to Maisie's knowledge since the lowly governess days, the gray dawn of their connection. But she wept now with passion, professing loudly that it did her good, and saying remarkable things to her charge, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an addition to all the fine precautionary wisdom stored away. It somehow hadn't violated that wisdom, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs. Beale what she had not told Sir Claude, in as much as the greatest strain, to her sense, was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude's wife, and his wife was just what Mrs. Beale was, unfortunately not. He sent his stepdaughter three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens, a message as frank as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale had had to bring out in a manner that seemed half an appeal, half a defence. Well, yes, hang it, I do see him. How and when and where, however, were just what Maisie was not to know, an exclusion moreover that she never questioned in the light of a participation large enough to make him, while she shared the ample void of Mrs. Beale's rather blank independence, shine in her yearning eye like the single, the sovereign window-square of a great, dim, disproportioned room. As far as her father was concerned, such hours had no interruption, and then it was clear between them that each was thinking of the absent and thinking the other thought, so that he was an object of conscious reference in everything they said or did. The wretched truth, Mrs. Beale had to confess, was that she had hoped against hope, and that in the regents' park it was impossible Sir Claude should be really in and out. Hadn't they at last to look the fact in the face? It was too disgustingly evident that no one after all had been squared. Well, if no one had been squared it was because every one had been vile. No one and every one were of course Beale and Ida, the extent of whose power to be nasty was a thing that, to a little girl, Mrs. Beale simply couldn't give chapter and verse for. Therefore it was that to keep going at all, as she said, that lady had to make, as she also said, another arrangement—the arrangement in which Maisie was included only to the point of knowing it existed and wondering wistfully what it was. Conspicuously at any rate it had a side that was responsible for Mrs. Beale's sudden emotion and sudden confidence. A demonstration this, however, of which the tearfulness was far from deterrent to our heroine's thought of how happy she should be, if only she could make an arrangement for herself. Mrs. Beale's own operated it appeared with regularity and frequency, for it was almost every day or two that she was able to bring Maisie a message and to take one back. It had been over the vision of what, as she called it, he did for her that she broke down, and this vision was kept in a manner before Maisie by a subsequent increase not only of the gaiety, but literally—it seemed not presumptuous to perceive—of the actual virtue of her friend. The friend was herself the first to proclaim it. He had pulled her up immensely. He had quite pulled her round. She had charming tormenting words about him. He was her good fairy, her hidden spring. Above all he was just her higher conscience. That was what had particularly come out with her startling tears. He had made her, dear man, think ever so much better of herself. It had been thus rather surprisingly revealed that she had been in a way to think ill, and Maisie was glad to hear of the corrective at the same time that she heard of the ailment. She presently found herself supposing, and in spite of her envy even hoping, that whenever Mrs. Beale was out of the house Sir Claude had in some manner the satisfaction of it. This was now of more frequent occurrence than ever before. So much so, that she would have thought of her stepmother as almost extravagantly absent had it not been that, in the first place, her father was a superior specimen of that habit. It was the frequent remark of his present wife, as it had been, before the tribunals of their country, a prominent plea of her predecessor, that he scarce came home even to sleep. In the second place Mrs. Beale, when she was on the spot, had now a beautiful air of longing to make up for everything. The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as Maisie put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It was in the nature of things to be none of a small child's business, even when a small child had from the first been deluded into a fear that she might be only too much initiated. Things then were in Maisie's experience so true to their nature, that questions were almost always improper. But she learned, on the other hand, soon to recognize how it lasts sometimes. Patient little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Bille Farage's when the monosyllable he meant always, meant almost violently, the master. But all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude's merits were of themselves so much in the air that scarce took even two letters to name him. He keeps me up splendidly, he does my own precious," Mrs. Beale would observe to her comrade, or else she would say that the situation at the other establishment had reached a point that could scarcely be believed, the point, monstrous as it sounded, of his not having laid eyes upon her for twelve days. She, of course, at Bille Farage's, had never meant anyone but Ida. And there was the difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed intensity. Mrs. Beale, it was striking, was in a position to animadvert more and more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all which appeared to be how abominably let blessedly little she had to do with her husband. This flow of information came home to our two friends, because truly Mrs. Beale had not much more to do with her own. But that was one of the reflections that Maisie could make without allowing it to break the spell of her present sympathy. How could such a spell be anything but deep when Sir Claude's influence, operating from afar, at last really determined the presumption of his step-daughter's studies? Mrs. Beale again took fire about them, and was quite vivid for Maisie as to there being the great matter to which the dear absent one kept her up. This was the second source, I have just alluded to the first, of the child's consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she described to herself as a new phase, and it also presented in the brightest light the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always reappeared, and which really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very dear at least to two persons. That she had small remembrance at present of a third illustrates, I am afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wicks—an accident to be explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. For what was the form taken by Mrs. Beale's enthusiasm and acquired relief in the domestic conditions still left to her, but the delightful form of reading with her little charge on lines directly prescribed and in works profusely supplied by Sir Claude? He had got hold of an awfully good list—mostly essays, don't you know? Mrs. Beale had said, a word always august to Maisie, but henceforth to be softened by Hazie, in fact by quite languorous edges. There was at any rate a week in which no less than nine volumes arrived, and the impression was to be gathered for Mrs. Beale that the obscure intercourse she enjoyed with Sir Claude not only involved an account and a criticism of studies, but was organized almost for the very purpose of report and consultation. It was for Maisie's education, in short, that, as she often repeated, she closed her door, closed it to the gentleman who used to flock there in such numbers, and whom her husband's practical desertion of her would have made it a course of the highest indelicacy to receive. Maisie was familiar from of old with the principle, at least, of the care that a woman, as Mrs. Beale phrased it, attractive and exposed, must take of her character, and was duly impressed with the rigor of her stepmother's scruples. There was literally no one of the other sex whom she seemed to feel at liberty to see at home, and when the child risked an inquiry about the ladies, who, one by one, during her own previous period, had been made quite loudly welcome, Mrs. Beale hastened to inform her that, one by one, they had, the fiends, been found out, after all, to be awful. If she wished to know more about them, she was recommended to approach her father. Maisie had, however, at the very moment of this injunction, much livelier curiosities, for the dream of lectures at an institution had at last become a reality, thanks to Sir Claude's now unbounded energy in discovering what could be done. It stood out in this connection that when you come to look into things in a spirit of earnestness, an immense deal could be done for very little more than your fare in the underground. The institution, there was a splendid one in a part of town but little known to the child, became, in the glow of such a spirit, a thrilling place, and the walk to it from the station through Glower Street, a pronunciation for which Mrs. Beale once laughed at her little friend, a pathway literally strewn with subjects. Maisie imagined herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened in the great gray rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a high voice that she at first took to be angry, plashed in the stillness of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. It must do us good. It's all so hideous!" Mrs. Beale had immediately declared, manifesting a purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious of all the many on which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly had never, in such an association, felt so uplifted, and never, above all, been so carried off her feet, as at the moments of Mrs. Beale's breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs to know if they should still be in time for a lecture. Her step-daughter, already from the earliest hours, almost leaped over the banister to respond, and they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations. There had been in short no bustle like these particular spasms, once they had broken out, since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wicks, blowing as if she were grooming her, made up for everything previously lost at her father's. These weeks, as well, were too few, but they were flooded with a new emotion, part of which indeed came from the possibility that, through the long telescope of Glower Street, or perhaps between the pillars of the institution, which impressive objects were what Maisie thought most made at one, they should some day spy, sir Claude. That was what Mrs. Beale, under pressure, had said doubtlessly a little impatiently. Oh yes, oh yes, some day! His joining them was clearly far less of a matter of course than was to have been gathered from his original profession of desire to improve in their company, his own mind. And this sharpened our young lady's guess that since that occasion either something destructive had happened or something desirable hadn't. Mrs. Beale had thrown but a partial light in telling her how it had turned out that nobody had been squared. Maisie wished at any rate that somebody would be squared. However, though in every approach to the temple of knowledge, she watched in vain for sir Claude, there was no doubt about the action of his loved image as an incentive and a recompense, when the institution was most on pillars, or, as Mrs. Beale put it, on stilts, when the subject was deepest and the lecture longest and the listener's ugliest, then it was they both felt their patron in the background would be most pleased with them. One day, abruptly, with a glance at this background, Mrs. Beale said to her companion, We'll go to-night to the Thingamabob at Earl's Court. An announcement putting forth its full luster when she had made known that she referred to the great exhibition just opened in that quarter, a collection of extraordinary foreign things and tremendous gardens, with illuminations, bands, elephants, switchbacks and sideshows, as well as crowds of people among whom they might possibly see someone they knew. Maisie flew in the same bound at the neck of her friend and at the name of sir Claude, on which Mrs. Beale confessed that, well, yes, there was just a chance that he would be able to meet them. He never, of course, in his terrible position knew what might happen from hour to hour, but he hoped to be free, and he had given Mrs. Beale the tip. Bring her there on the quiet and I'll try to turn up. This was clear enough on what so many weeks of probation had made of his desire to see the child. It even appeared to represent on his part a yearning as constant as her own. That in turn was just puzzling enough to make Maisie express a bewilderment. She couldn't see, if they were so intensely of the same mind, why the theory on which she had come back to Mrs. Beale, the general reunion, the delightful trio, should have broken down so in fact. Mrs. Beale furthermore only gave her more to think about in saying that their disappointment was the result of his having gotten to his head a kind of idea. What kind of idea? Oh, goodness knows! she spoke when approached to asperity. He's so awfully delicate. Delicate! that was ambiguous. About what he does, don't you know? said Mrs. Beale. She fumbled. Well, about what we do. Maisie wondered, you and me. Me and him, silly! cried Mrs. Beale with, this time a real giggle. But you don't do any harm. You don't! said Maisie, wondering afresh and intending her emphasis as a decorous allusion to her parents. Of course we don't, you angel. That's just the ground I take. Her companion exultantly responded. He says he doesn't want you mixed up. Mixed up with what? That's exactly what I want to know. Mixed up with what and how you are any more mixed—Mrs. Beale paused without ending her question. She ended after an instant in a different way. All you can say is that it's his fancy. The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the fruit of weariness that dismissed the subject, conveyed so vividly how much such a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own, that our young lady was led by the mere fact of contact to arrive at a dim apprehension of the unuttered and the unknown. The relation between her step-parents had then a mysterious residuum. This was the first time she really had reflected that except as regards herself, it was not a relationship. To each other it was only what they might have happened to make it, and she gathered that this, in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away from her. Didn't he fear she would be compromised? The perception of such a scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her that she might simplify everything by showing him how little she made of such a danger. Hadn't she lived with her eyes on it from her third year? It was the condition most frequently discussed at the pharynge's, where the word was always in the air, and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause, she could gavel it off. She knew as well and short that a person could be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hairbrush, or left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But the first thing was to make absolutely sure of Mrs. Biel. This was done by saying to her thoughtfully, Well, if you don't mind, and you really don't, do you? Mrs. Biel with a dawn of amusement considered mixing you up, not a bit, for what does it mean? Whatever it means, I don't in the least mind being mixed. Therefore, if you don't and I don't," Maisie concluded, Don't you think that when I see him this evening I had better just tell him we don't, and ask him why in the world he should? CHAPTER XVIII. The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much of Sir Claude at the Thingamabob, which took for them a very different turn indeed. On the spot Mrs. Biel, with hilarity, had urged her to the course proposed. But later at the exhibition she withdrew this allowance, mentioning, as a result of second thoughts, that when a man was so sensitive anything at all frisky usually made him worse. It would have been hard indeed for Sir Claude to be worse, Maisie felt, as in the gardens and the crowd when the first dazzle had dropped she looked for him in vain up and down. They had all their time, the couple, for frugal, wistful wandering. They had partaken together at home of the light of vague meal. Maisie's name for it was a jam supper, to which they were reduced when Mr. Farage sought his pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that Mr. Farage pursued this ideal, and it was the actual impression of his daughter, derived from his wife, that he had three days before joined a friend's yacht at Coe. The place was full of sideshows, to which Mrs. Biel could introduce the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so enthralling a name. The sideshows each time were sixpence apiece, and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences. Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more slowly the great painted posters, pressing with a linked arm closer to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the audible chink of a shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning. If sir Claude would only at last come, the shillings would begin to ring. The companions paused, for want of one, before the flowers of the forest, a large presentment of bright brown ladies. They were brown all over. In a medium suggested of tropical exurience, and there Maisie dolerously expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not been promised as a certainty—a remark that caused the child to gaze at the flowers through a blur in which they became more magnificent, yet oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the aspect of a gentleman, who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first took her for one of the flowers, but during the few seconds that this required, a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up sir Claude, she heard Mrs. Beale's voice behind her, gather both wonder and pain into a single sharp little cry. Of all the wickedness! Beale! He had already, without distinguishing them in the mass of strollers, turned another way. It seemed at the brown lady's suggestion. Her course was marked over heads and shoulders by an upright scarlet plume as to the ownership of which Maisie was instantly eager. Who is she? Who is she? But Mrs. Beale for a moment only looked after them. The liar! The liar! Maisie considered. Because he's not where one thought. That was also a month ago in Kensington Gardens where her mother had not been. Perhaps he has come back. She was quick to contribute. He never went the hound. That, according to sir Claude, had been also what her mother had not done, and Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a mature mind would be called the way history repeats itself. Who is she? she asked again. Mrs. Beale fixed to the spot, seemed lost to the vision of an opportunity missed. If he had only seen me, it came from between her teeth. She's a brand new one, but he must have been with her since Tuesday. Maisie took it in. She's almost black, she then reported. They're always hideous, said Mrs. Beale. This was a remark on which the child had again to reflect. Oh, not his wives! she remonstantly exclaimed. The words at another moment would probably have set her friend off, but Mrs. Beale was now in her instant vigilance too immensely on. Did you ever in your life see such a feather? She presently continued. This decoration appeared to have paused at some distance, and in spite of intervening groups they could both look at it. Oh, that's the way they dress, the vulgarest of the vulgar. They're coming back! They'll see us! Maisie the next moment cried, and while her companion answered that this was exactly what she wanted and the child returned, here they are! Here they are! The unconscious subjects of so much attention, with a change of mind about their direction, quickly retraced their steps and precipitated themselves upon their critics. Their unconsciousness gave Mrs. Beale time to leap, under her breath, to a recognition which Maisie caught. It must be Mrs. Cudden. Maisie looked at Mrs. Cudden hard. Her lips even echoed the name. What followed was extraordinarily rapid, a minute of livelier battle than had ever yet, in so short a span at least, been waged round our heroine. The muffled shock, lest people should notice, was violent, and it was only for her later thought that the steps fell into their order, the steps through which, in a bewilderment not so much of sound as of silence, she had come to find herself, too soon for comprehension than too strangely for fear, at the door of the exhibition with her father. He thrust her into a handsome and got in after her, and then it was, as she drove along with him, that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and a toss of red plumage, Mrs. Cudden had recognized them, ejaculated, and vanished. There had been another moment at which she became aware of Sir Claude, also poised there in surprise, but out of her father's view, as if he had been warned off at the very moment of reaching them. It fell into its place, with all the rest, that she had heard Mrs. Biel say to her father, but whether low or loud was now lost to her, something about his having this time a new one, on which he had growled something indistinct but apparently in the tone and of the sort that the child, from her earliest years, had associated with hearing somebody retort to somebody that somebody was another. Oh! I stick to the old!" Mrs. Biel had then quite loudly pronounced, and her accent, even as the cab got away, was still in the air, Maisie's effective companion, having spoken no other word from the moment of whisking her off, none at least saved the indistinguishable address, which, over the top of the handsome and poised on the step, he had given the driver. Reconstructing these things later, Maisie theorized that she at this point would have put a question to him, had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her, she could scarcely tell which, come from his suddenly making her feel his arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way he had never yet shown her. It struck her he trembled, trembled too much to speak, and this had the effect of making her, with an emotion which, though it had begun to throb in an instant, was by no means all dread, conformed to his portentous hush. The act of possession that his pressure in a manner advertised, came back to her after the longest of the long intermissions that had ever let anything come back. They drove and drove, and he kept her close. She stared straight before her, holding her breath, watching one dark street succeed another, and strangely conscious that what it all meant was somehow that papa was less to be left out of everything than she had supposed. It took her but a minute to surrender to this discovery, which, in the form of his present embrace, suggested a purpose in him prodigiously reaffirmed, and with that a confused confidence. She neither knew exactly what he had done nor what he was doing. She could only, altogether impressed and rather proud, vibrate with the sense that he had jumped up to do something, and that she had as quickly become a part of it. It was a part of it, too, that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh, white front of which the street lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes. The child had been in thousands of stories, all Mrs. Wicks's and her own, to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise, but she had never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian knights had quite closed round her. In this minute that pitch of the wondrous was in everything, particularly in such an instant, open sesame, and in the departure of the cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents. It was, with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little brass knob on the wall, in a place that, at the top of a short, soft staircase, struck her as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady. Obviously she could see in a moment, and not of a gentleman, not even of one like papa himself, or even like Sir Claude, whose things were as much prettier than mamas, as it had always had to be confessed that mamas were prettier than Mrs. Beals. In the middle of the small bright room and the presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver boxes scattered over little crooked tables, and little oval miniatures hooked upon velvet screens, than Mrs. Beal and her ladyship together could, in an unnatural alliance, have dreamed of mustering, the child became aware, with a sharp foretaste of compassion, of something that was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the spot be presented to her as quite advantageously, and even grandly at home in the dazzling scene, and himself by so much the more separated from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while explanations continued to hang back, twenty minutes that, in their sudden drop of danger, affected her, though there were neither buns nor ginger beer, like an extemporized expensive treat. Is she very rich? He had begun to strike her as almost embarrassed, so shy that he might have found himself with the young lady with whom he had little in common. She was literally moved by this apprehension to offer him some tactful relief. Neil Farage stood and smiled at his young lady, his back to the fanciful fireplace, his light overcoat, the very lightest in London, wide open, and his wonderful lustrous beard completely concealing the expanse of his shirt front. It pleased her more than ever to think that papa was handsome, and though as high aloft as mamma, and almost in his specially floored evening dress as splendid, of a beauty somehow less belligerent, less terrible. The Countess, why do you ask me that? Maisie's eyes opened wider. Is she a Countess? He seemed to treat her wonder as a positive tribute. Oh, yes, my dear, but it isn't an English title. Her manner appreciated this. Is it a French one? No, nor French either. It's American. She conversed agreeably. Ah, then of course she must be rich. She took in such a combination of nationality and rank. I never saw anything so lovely. Did you have a sight of her? Biel asked. At the exhibition, Maisie smiled. She was gone too quick. Her father laughed. She did slope. He had feared he would say something about Mrs. Biel and Sir Claude, yet the way he spared them made her rather uneasy, too. All he risked was the next minute. She has a horror of vulgar scenes. This was something she needed to take up. She could still continue bland. But where do you suppose she went? Oh, I thought she'd have taken a cab and have been here by this time. But she'll turn up all right. I'm sure I hope she will. Maisie said. She spoke with an earnestness begotten of the impression of all the beauty about them, to which in person the Countess might make further contribution. We came awfully fast, she added. Her father again laughed loud. Yes, my dear, I made you step out. He waited an instant, then pursued. I want her to see you. Only at this rejoiced in the attention that, for their evening out, Mrs. Biel, even to the extent of personally doing up her old hat, had given her appearance. Meanwhile her father went on, You'll like her awfully. Oh, I'm sure I shall. After which, either from the effect of having said so much, or from that of a sudden glimpse of the impossibility of saying more, she felt an embarrassment and sought refuge in a minor branch of the subject. I thought she was Mrs. Cudden. Biel's gaiety rather increased than diminished. You mean my wife did? My dear child, my wife's a damned fool! He had the oddest air of speaking of his wife as of a person whom she might scarcely have known, so that the refuge of her scruple didn't prove particularly happy. Biel, on the other hand, appeared after an instant himself to feel a scruple. What I mean is, to speak seriously, that she doesn't really know anything about anything. He paused, following the child's charmed eyes and tentative step or two, as they brought her nearer to the pretty things on one of the tables. She thinks she has good things, don't you know? He quite jeered at Mrs. Biel's delusion. Maisy felt she must confess that it was one—everything she had missed at the sideshows was made up to her by the Countess's luxuries. Yes, she considered. She does think that. There was again a dryness in the way Biel replied that it didn't matter what she thought, but there was an increasing sweetness for his daughter and being with him so long without his doing anything worse. The whole hour, of course, was to remain with her, for days and weeks, ineffacably allumined and confirmed, by the end of which she was able to read into it a hundred things that had been at the moment mere miraculous pleasantness. What they at the moment came to was simply that her companion was still in a good deal of a flutter, yet wished not to show it, and that, just in proportion as he succeeded in this attempt, he was able to encourage her to regard him as kind. He moved about the room after a little, showed her things, spoke to her as a person of taste, told her the name, which she remembered, of the famous French lady represented in one of the miniatures, and remarked, as if he had caught her wistful over a trinket or a trailing stuff, that he made no doubt the Countess, on coming in, would give her something jolly. He spied a pink satin box with a looking-glass led into the cover, which he raised with a quick, facetious flourish, to offer her the privilege of six rows of chocolate bonbons, cutting out thereby Sir Claude, who had never gone beyond four rows. I can do what I like with these," he said, for I don't mind telling you, I gave him to her myself. The Countess had evidently appreciated the gift, there were numerous gaps, a ravage now quite unchecked in the array. Even while they waited together, Maisie had her sense, which was the mark of what their separation had become, of her having grown for him, since the last time he had, as it were, noticed her, and by increase of years and of inches, if by nothing else, much more of a little person to reckon with. Yes, this was a part of the positive awkwardness that he carried off by being almost foolishly tender. There was a passage, during which, on the yellow silk sofa under one of the palms, he had her on his knee, stroking her hair, playfully holding her off while he showed his shining fangs, and let her with a vague affectionate helpless, pointless, dear old girl, dear little daughter, inhale the fragrance of his cherished beard. She must have been sorry for him, she afterwards knew. So well could she privately follow his difficulty in being specific to her about anything. She had such possibilities of vibration, of response, that it needed nothing more than this to make up to her, in fact, for omissions. The tears came into her eyes again as they had done when in the park that day, the captain told her so splendidly that her mother was good. What was this but splendid, too? This still director-goodness of her father, and this unexampled shining solitude with him, out of which everything had dropped but that he was papa, and that he was magnificent. It didn't spoil it that she finally felt he must have, as he became restless, some purpose he didn't quite see his way to bring out, for in the freshness of their recovered fellowship, she would have lent herself gleefully to his suggesting, or even to his pretending, that their relations were easy and graceful. There was something in him that seemed, and quite touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend. Pretend he knew enough about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view of himself, to give the questions he couldn't put her a natural domestic tone. He would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given her the cue. She waited for it while between his big teeth. He breathed the sigh she didn't know to be stupid. And as if, though he was so stupid all through, he had let the friendly suffusion of her eyes yet tell him she was ready for anything, he floundered about, wondering what the devil he could lay hold of. CHAPTER XIX When he had lighted a cigarette and begun to smoke in her face, it was as if he had struck with the match the note of some queer, clumsy ferment of old professions, old scandals, old duties, a dim perception of what he possessed in her, and what, if everything had only, damn it, being totally different, she might still be able to give him. What she was able to give him, however, as his blinking eyes seemed to make out through the smoke, would be simply what he should be able to get from her. To give something, to give here on the spot, was all her own desire. Among the old things that came back was her little instinct of keeping the peace. It made her wonder more sharply what particular thing she could do or not do, what particular word she could speak or not speak, what particular line she could take or not take, that might for every one, even for the Countess, give a better turn to the crisis. She was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender, a surrender of everything but Sir Claude, of everything but Mrs. Beale. The immensity didn't include them, but if he had an idea at the back of his head, she had also won in a recess as deep, and for a time while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision. What there was no effective record of, indeed, was the small, strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. What further, Beale finally laid hold of while he masked again with his fine presence half the flounces of the fireplace was— Do you know, my dear, I shall soon be off to America. It struck his daughter both as a shortcut and as the way he wouldn't have said it to his wife, but his wife figured with a bright superficial assurance in her response. What do you mean with Mrs. Beale? Her father looked at her hard. Don't be a little ass. Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be. Then with the Countess? With her or without her, my dear, that concerns only your poor daddy. She has big interests over there and she wants me to take a look at them. Maisie threw herself into them. Will that take very long? Yes, they're in such a muddle. It may take months. Now what I want to hear you know is whether you'd like to come along. Planted once more before him in the middle of the room, she felt herself turning white. I—she gasped, yet feeling as soon as she had spoken that such a note of dismay was not altogether pretty. She felt it still more while her father replied, with a shake of his legs, a toss of his cigarette ash and a fidgety look—he was for ever taking one—all the length of his waistcoat and trousers, that she needn't be quite so disgusted. It helped her in a few seconds to appear more as he would like her that she saw, in the lovely light of the Countess's splendor, exactly, however she appeared, the right answer to make. Dear papa, I'll go with you anywhere." He turned his back to her and stood with his nose at the glass of the chimney-piece while he brushed specks of ash out of his beard. Then he abruptly said, "'Do you know anything about your brute of a mother?' It was just of her brute of a mother that the manner of the question in a remarkable degree reminded her. It had the free flight of one of Ida's fine bridgings of space. With the sense of this was kindled for Maisie at the same time in inspiration. Oh, yes! I know everything!" And she became so radiant that her father, seeing it in the mirror, turned back to her and presently, on the sofa, had her at his knee again and was again particularly affecting. Maisie's inspiration instructed her, pressingly, that the more she should be able to say about Mama, the less she would be called upon to speak of her step-parents. She kept hoping the Countess would come in before her power to protect them was exhausted, and it was now, in closer quarters with her companion, that the idea at the back of her head shifted its place to her lips. She told him she had met her mother in the park with a gentleman, who, while Sir Claude had strolled with her ladyship, had been kind and sat and talked to her. Setting the scene with the remembrance of her pledge of secrecy to the Captain, quite brushed away by the joy of seeing Beale listen without profane interruption. It was almost an amazement, but it was indeed all a joy, thus to be able to guess that Papa was at last quite tired of his anger, of his anger at any rate about Mama. He was only bored with her now. That made it, however, the more imperative that his spent displeasure shouldn't be blown out again. It charmed the child to see how much she could interest him, and the charm remained even when, after asking her a dozen questions, he observed musingly and a little obscurely. Yes, damned if she won't. For in this, too, there was a detachment, a wise weariness that made her feel safe. She had had to mention Sir Claude, though she mentioned him as little as possible, and Beale only appeared to look quite over his head. It pieced itself together for her that this was the mildness of general indifference, a source of profit so great for herself personally, that if the Countess was the author of it she was prepared literally to hug the Countess. She betrayed that eagerness by a restless question about her, to which her father replied, "'Oh, she has a head on her shoulders. I'll back her to get out of anything.' He looked at Maisie quite as if he could trace the connection between her enquiry and the impatience of her gratitude. Do you mean to say you'd really come with me?' She felt as if he were now looking at her very hard indeed, and also as if she had grown ever so much older. "'I'll do anything in the world you ask me, papa.' He gave again, with a laugh and with his legs apart, his proprietary glance at his waistcoat and trousers. "'That's a way, my dear, of saying, no thank you. You know you don't want to go the least little might. You can't humbug me.' Beale Farange laid down. "'I don't want to bully you. I never bullied you in my life. But I make you the offer, and it's to take or to leave. Your mother will never again have any more to do with you than if you were a kitchen maid she had turned out for going wrong. Therefore, of course, I am your natural protector, and you've a right to get everything out of me you can. Now's your chance, you know, you won't be half-clever if you don't. You can't say I don't put it before you. You can't say I ain't kind to you or that I don't play fair. Mind you never say that, you know, it would bring me down on you. I know what's proper. I'll take you again just as I have taken you again and again, and I much obliged to you for making up such a face.' She was conscious enough that her face, indeed, couldn't please him if it showed any sign, just as she hoped it didn't, of her sharp impression of what he really now wanted to do. Was it he trying to turn the tables on her, embarrass her somehow and to admitting that what would really suit her little book would be, after doing so much for good manners, to leave her holy at liberty to arrange for herself? She began to be nervous again. It rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting for ever, and that he had brought her there for so many caresses only because it was important such an occasion should look better for him than any other. For her to spoil it by the note of discord would certainly give him ground for complaint, and the child was momentarily bewildered between her alternatives of agreeing with him about her wanting to get rid of him and displeasing him by pretending to stick to him. So she found for the moment no solution but to murmur very helplessly, Oh, papa! Oh, papa! I know what you're up to, don't tell me. After which she came straight over, and in the most inconsequent way in the world, clasp turned his arms a moment, and rubbed his beard against her cheek. Then she understood, as well as if he had spoken it, that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours, with all the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as if he had broken out to her. I say, you little booby, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us, so you must take it all. Repudiate your dear old daddy. In the face, mind you, of his tender supplications. He can't be rough with you. It isn't his nature. Therefore you'll have successfully chucked him, because he was too generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty. This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back. That portion of her person had never been so thumped since model thumped her when she choked. After a moment he gave her the further impression of having become sure enough of her to be able very gracefully to say out, You know your mother loathes you, loathes you simply, and I've been thinking over your precious man, the fellow you told me about. Well—Macy replied with confidence—I'm sure of him. Her father was vague for an instant. Do you mean sure of his liking you? Oh, no! Of his liking her? Beale had a return of gaiety. There's no accounting for tastes. It's what they all say, you know. I don't care. I'm sure of him," Macy repeated. Sure you mean that she'll bolt? Macy knew all about bolting. But decidedly she was older, and there was something in her that could wince at the way her father made the ugly word, ugly enough at best, sound flat and low. It prompted her to amend his illusion, which she did by saying, I don't know what she'll do, but she'll be happy. Let us hope so, said Beale, almost as for edification. The more happy she is at any rate, the less she'll want you about. That's why I press you, he agreeably pursued, to consider this handsome offer. I mean seriously, you know, of your soul-surviving parent. Their eyes at this met again in a long and extraordinary communion which terminated in his ejaculating, ha, you little scoundrel. She took it from him in the manner it seemed to her he would like best, and with a success that encouraged him to go on, you are a deep little devil. Her silence, ticking like a watch, acknowledged even this, in confirmation of which he finally brought out, you've settled it with the other pair. Well, what if I have? She sounded to herself most bold. Her father, quite as in the old days, broken to appeal. Why don't you know they're awful? She grew bolder still. I don't care, not a bit. But they're probably the very worst people in the world and the very greatest criminals, Beale pleasantly urged. I'm not the man, my dear, not to let you know it. Well, it doesn't prevent them from loving me. They love me tremendously. Maisie turned crimson to hear herself. Her companion fumbled. Almost any one, let alone a daughter, would have seen how conscientious he wanted to be. My dear, say, but do you know why?" She braved his eyes, and he added, You're a jolly good protect. For what, Maisie asked? Why for their game? I needn't tell you what that is. The child reflected. Well, then, that's all the more reason. Reason for what, pray? For there being kind to me. And for your keeping in with them? Beale roared again. It was as if his spirits rose and rose. Do you realize, pray, that in saying that you're a monster? She turned it over. A monster? They've made one of you. Upon my honour it's quite awful. It shows the kind of people they are. Don't you understand, Beale pursued, that when they've made you as horrid as they can, as horrid as themselves, they'll just simply chuck you. She had at this a flicker of passion. They won't chuck me. I beg your pardon," her father courteously insisted. It's my duty to put it before you. I shouldn't forgive myself if I didn't point out to you that they'll cease to require you. He spoke as if with an appeal to her intelligence that she must be ashamed not adequately to meet, and this gave a real distinction to his superior delicacy. It cleared the case, as he had wished. Seize to require me because they won't care. She paused with that sketch of her idea. Of course Sir Claude won't care of his wife bolts. That's his game. It will suit him down to the ground. This was a proposition Maisie could perfectly embrace, but it still left a loophole for triumph. She turned it well over. You mean if Emma doesn't come back ever at all? The composure with which her face was presented to that prospect would have shown a spectator the long road she had travelled. Well, but that won't put Mrs. Beale in the same comfortable position. Beale took her up with relish. He had sprung to his feet again, shaking his legs and looking at his shoes. Right you are, darling! Something more will be wanting from Mrs. Beale. He just paused, and then he added, but she may not have long to wait for it. Maisie also for a minute looked at his shoes, though they were not the pair she most admired, the laced yellow uppers and patent leather complement. At last with a question she raised her eyes. Aren't you coming back? Once more he hung fire, after which she gave a small laugh that in the oddest way in the world reminded her of the unique sound she had heard emitted by Mrs. Wicks. It may strike you as extraordinary that I should make you such an admission, and in point of fact you're not to understand that I do, but I'll put it that way to help your decision. The point is that that's the way my wife will presently be sure to put it. You'll hear her shrieking that she's deserted so that she may just pile up her wrongs. You'll be as free as she likes, then, as free you see as your mother's muff of a husband. They won't have anything more to consider, and they'll just put you into the street. Do I understand, Beale inquired, that in the face of what I press on you you still prefer to take the risk of that? It was the most wonderful appeal any gentleman had ever addressed to his daughter, and it had placed Maisie in the middle of the room again, while her father moved slowly about her with his hands in his pockets, and something in his step that seemed more than anything else he had done to show the habit of the place. She turned her fevered little eyes over his friend's brightnesses, as if on her own side to press for some help in a quandary unexampled. As if also the pressure reached him, he after an instant stopped short, completing the prodigy of his attitude and the pride of his loyalty by a supreme formulation of the general inducement. You've an eye, love. Yes, there's money. No end of money. This affected her at first in the manner of some great flashing dazzle in one of the pantomimes to which Sir Claude had taken her. She saw nothing in it but what it directly conveyed. And shall I never—never see you again? If I do go to America! Beale brought it out like a man. Never. Never, never. Hereupon with the utmost absurdity she broke down. Everything gave way. Everything but the horror of hearing herself definitely utter such an ugliness as the acceptance of that. So she only stiffened herself and said, Then I can't give you up. She held him some seconds looking at her, showing her a strained grimace, a perfect parade of all his teeth, in which it seemed to her she could read the disgust he didn't quite like to express at this departure from the pliability she had practically promised. But before she could attenuate in any way the crudity of her collapse, he gave an impatient jerk which took him to the window. She heard a vehicle stop. Beale looked out, then he freshly faced her. He still said nothing, but she knew the countess had come back. There was a silence again between them, but with a different shade of embarrassment from that of their united arrival, and it was still without speaking that, abruptly repeating one of the embraces of which she had already been so prodigal, he whisked her back to the lemon sofa just before the door of the room was thrown open. It was thus in renewed and intimate union with him that she was presented to a person whom she instantly recognized as the brown lady. The brown lady looked almost as astonished, though not quite as alarmed, as when at the exhibition she had gasped in the face of Mrs. Beale. Maisie and Truth almost gasped in her own. This was with the fuller perception that she was brown indeed. She literally struck the child more as an animal than as a real lady. She might have been a clever, frizzled poodle in a frill, or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big, and eyes that were far too small, and a moustache that was, well, not so happy a feature as Sir Claude's. Beale jumped up to her, while to the child's astonishment, though as if in a quick intensity of thought, the Countess advanced as gaily as if, for many a day, nothing awkward had happened for any one. Maisie, in spite of a large acquaintance with the phenomenon, had never seen it so promptly established that nothing awkward was to be mentioned. The next minute the Countess had kissed her, and exclaimed to Beale with a bright, tender reproach, Why, you never told me half. My dear child!" she cried, It was awfully nice of you to come. But she hasn't come. She won't come. Beale answered, I've put it to her how much you'd like it, but she declines to have anything to do with us. The Countess stood smiling, and after an instant that was mainly taken up with the shock of her weird aspect, Maisie felt herself reminded of another smile which was not ugly, though also interested, the kind light thrown that day in the park from the clean, fair face of the Captain. Papa's Captain, yes, was the Countess, but she wasn't nearly so nice as the other. It all came back doubtless to Maisie's minor appreciation of ladies. Shouldn't you like me? said this one endearingly, to take you to Spa. To Spa? The child repeated the name to gain time, not to show how the Countess brought back to her a dim remembrance of a strange woman with a horrid face, who once years before in an omnibus, bending to her from an opposite seat, had suddenly produced an orange and murmured, Little dearie, won't you have it? She had felt then, for some reason, a small silly terror, though afterwards conscious that her interlocutress, unfortunately hideous, had particularly meant to be kind. This was also what the Countess meant, yet the few words she had uttered and the smile with which she had uttered them immediately cleared everything up. Oh no! She wanted to go nowhere with her, for her presence had already in a few seconds dissipated the happy impression of the room, and put an end to the pleasure briefly taken in Beale's command of such elegance. There was no command of elegance in his having exposed her to the approach of the short, fat, weadling, whiskered person, in whom she had now to recognize the only figure wholly without attraction involved in any of the intimate connections her immediate circle had witnessed the growth of. She was abashed, meanwhile, however, at having appeared to weigh in the balance the place to which she had been invited, and she added as quickly as possible. It isn't to America, then. The Countess, at this, looked sharply at Beale, and Beale, eerily enough, asked what the deuce it mattered when she had already given him to understand she wanted to have nothing to do with them. There followed between her companions a passage of which the sense was drowned for her in the deepening inward hum of her mere desire to get off, though she was able to guess later on that her father must have put it to his friend that it was no use talking, that she was an obstinate little pig, and that, beside, she was really old enough to choose for herself. It glimmered back to her, indeed, that she must have failed quite dreadfully to seem ideally other than rude, in as much as before she knew it, she had visibly given the impression that if they didn't allow her to go home, she should cry. Oh, if there had ever been a thing to cry about, it was being so consciously and gawkily below the handsomest offers any one could ever have received. The great pain of the thing was that she could see the Countess liked her enough to wish to be liked in return, and it was from the idea of a return she sought utterly to flee. It was the idea of a return that, after a confusion of loud words had broken out between the others, brought to her lips with the tremor preceding disaster. Can't I please be sent home in a cab? Yes, the Countess wanted her, and the Countess was wounded and chilled, and she couldn't help it, and it was all the more dreadful because it only made the Countess more coaxing and more impossible. The only thing that sustained either of them, perhaps, till the cab came—Maisie presently saw it would come—was its being in the air somehow that Beale had done what he wanted. He went out to look for a conveyance. The servants, he said, had gone to bed, but she shouldn't be kept beyond her time. The Countess left the room with him, and alone in the possession of it, Maisie hoped she wouldn't come back. It was all the effect of her face. The child simply couldn't look at it and meet its expression halfway. All in a moment, too, that queer expression had leaped into the lovely things—all in a moment she had had to accept her father as liking someone whom she was sure neither her mother, nor Mrs. Beale, nor Mrs. Wicks, nor Sir Claude, nor the Captain, nor even Mr. Perriam and Lord Eric could possibly have liked. Three minutes later, downstairs with the cab at the door, it was perhaps as a final confession of not having much to boast of that, on taking leave of her, he managed to press her to his bosom without her seeing his face. For herself she was so eager to go that their parting reminded her of nothing, not even of a single one of all the never's that above, as the penalty of not cleaving to him he had attached to the question of their meeting again. There was something in the Countess that falsified everything—even the great interests in America and yet more the first flush of that superiority to Mrs. Beale and to Mama, which had been expressed in sev sets and silver boxes. These were still there, but perhaps there were no great interests in America. Mama had known an American who was not a bit like this one. She was not, however, of noble rank. Her name was only Mrs. Tucker. Macy's detachment would nonetheless have been more complete if she had not suddenly had to exclaim, Oh, dear! I haven't any money! Her father's teeth at this were such a picture of appetite without action, as to be a match for any plea of poverty. Make your stepmother pay. Stepmother's don't pay, cried the Countess. No stepmother ever paid in her life. The next moment they were in the street together, and the next the child was in the cab, with the Countess on the pavement but close to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out of a pocket. Her father had vanished and there was even yet nothing in that to reawaken the pang of loss. Here's money, said the brown lady. Go! The sound was commanding. The cab rattled off. Macy sat there with her hand full of coin. All that for a cab? As they passed a street lamp she bent to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of sovereigns. There must then have been great interests in America. It was still, at any rate, the Arabian knights. CHAPTER XXI. The money was far too much, even for a fee in a fairytale, and in the absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the hour was now late, had not yet returned to the regents' park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as loud as Macy was low, and as bold as she was bland, produced on the exhibition offered under the dim vigil of the lamp that made the place a constant to the child's recent scene of light, the half-crown that an unsophisticated cabman could pronounce to be the least he would take. It was apparently long before Mrs. Beale would arrive, and in the interval Macy had been induced by the prompt Susan not only to go to bed like a darling deer, but in still richer expression of that character. To devote to the repayment of obligations general as well as particular, one of the sovereigns in the ordered array that, on the dressing-table upstairs, was naturally not less dazzling to a lone orphan of a housemaid than to the subject of the maneuvers of a quartet. This subject went to sleep with her property gathered into a knotted handkerchief, the largest that could be produced and lodged under her pillow, but the explanations that on the morrow were inevitably more complete with Mrs. Beale than they had been with her humble friend, found their climax in a surrender also more becomingly free. There were explanations indeed that Mrs. Beale had to give as well as to ask, and the most striking of these was to the effect that it was dreadful for a little girl to make money from a woman who was simply the vilest of their sex. The sovereigns were examined with some attention. The result of which, however, was to make the author of that statement desire to know what, if one really went into the matter, they could be called but the wages of sin. Her companion went into it merely so far as the question of what then they were to do with them, on which Mrs. Beale, who had by this time put them into her pocket, replied with dignity and with her hand on the place, were to send them back on the spot. Susan, the child afterward soon learnt, had been invited to contribute to this act of restitution her one appropriated coin, but a closer clutch of the treasure showed in her private assurance to Maisie that there was a limit to the way she could be done. Maisie had been open with Mrs. Beale about the whole of last night's transaction, but she now found herself on the part of their indignant inferior, a recipient of remarks that were so many ringing tokens of that lady's own suppressions. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour—it was three in the morning if she really wanted to know—at which Mrs. Beale had re-entered the house. Another in accents as to which Maisie's criticism was still intensely tacit, characterised her appeal as such a guime—such a shime, as one had never had to put up with—a third treated with some vigor the question of the enormous sums due below stairs, in every department, for gratuitous labour and wasted zeal. Our young lady's consciousness was indeed mainly filled for several days with the apprehension created by the two slow subsistence of her attendance's sense of wrong. These days would become terrific like the revolution she had learnt by heart in histories, if an outbreak in the kitchen should crown them. And, to promote that prospect, she had, through Susan's eyes, more than one glimpse of the way in which revolutions are prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to the inflammables, and already causing them to crackle, would prove to have been the circumstance of ones being called a horrid, low thief, for refusing to part with one's own. The redeeming point of this tension was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to have had to do with a breathless perception in our heroine's breast that scarcely more as the centre of Sir Claude's than as that of Susan's energies she had soon after breakfast been conveyed from London to Folkestone and established at a lovely hotel. These agents, before her wondering eyes, had combined to carry through the adventure and to give it the air of having owed its success to the fact that Mrs. Beale had, as Susan said, but just stepped out. When Sir Claude, watch in hand, had met this fact with the exclamation, then pack Miss Farage and come off with us. There had ensued on the stairs a series of gymnastics of a nature to bring Miss Farage's heart into Miss Farage's mouth. She sat with Sir Claude in a four-wheeler while he held his watch, held it longer than any doctor who had ever felt her pulse, long enough to give her a vision of something like the ecstasy of neglecting such an opportunity to show impatience. The ecstasy had begun in the school-room and over the berseuse, quite in the manner of the same foretaste on the day, a little while back, when Susan had panted up and she herself after the hint about the Duchess, had sailed down. For what harm, then, had there been in drops and disappointments, if she could still have, even only a moment, the sensation of such a name brought up? It had remained with her that her father had foretold her she would some day be in the street, but it clearly wouldn't be this day, and she felt justified of the preference betrayed to that parent as soon as her visitor had set Susan in motion and laid his hand, while she waited with him, kindly on her own. This was what the captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done. Her present situation reminded her a little of that one, and renewed the dim wonder of the fashion after which, from the first, such pats and poles had struck her as the steps and signs of other people's business, and even a little as the wriggle or the overflow of their difficulties. What had failed her, and what had frightened her on the night of the exhibition, lost themselves at present alike in the impression that any surprise now about to burst from Sir Claude would be too big to burst all at once. Any awe that might have sprung from his air of leaving out her stepmother was corrected by the force of a general rule. The odd truth that if Mrs. Beale now never came, nor went without making her think of him, it was never to balance that, the main mark of his own renewed reality to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale. To be with Sir Claude was to think of Sir Claude, and that law governed Maisie's mind until, through a sudden lurch of the cab, which had at last taken in Susan and ever so many bundles and almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again somehow into her dizzy head, the long lost image of Mrs. Wicks. It was singular, but from this time she understood and she followed, followed with the sense of an ample filling out of any void created by symptoms of avoidance and of flight. Her ecstasy was a thing that had yet more of a face than of a back to turn, a pair of eyes still directed to Mrs. Wicks, even after the slight surprise of their not finding her as the journey expanded, either at the London Station or at the Folkestone Hotel. It took a few hours to make the child feel that if she was in neither of these places she was at least everywhere else. Maisie had known all along a great deal, but never so much as she was to know from this moment on, and as she learned in particular, during the couple of days that she was to hang in the air as it were, over the sea, which represented in breezy blueness and with a summer charm a crossing of more spaces than the channel. It was granted her at this time to arrive at divination so ample that I shall have no room for the goal if I attempt to trace the stages, as to which therefore I must be content to say that the fullest expression we may give to Sir Claude's conduct is a poor and pale copy of the picture it presented to his young friend. Abruptly that morning he had yielded to the action of the idea pumped into him for weeks by Mrs. Wicks on lines of approach that she had been capable of the extraordinary art of preserving from entanglement in the fine network of his relations with Mrs. Beale. The breath of her sincerity, blowing without a break, had puffed him up to the flight by which, in the degree I have indicated, Maisie too was carried off her feet. This consisted neither in more nor less than the brave stroke of his getting off from Mrs. Beale as well as from his wife, of making with the child straight for some such foreign land as would give a support to Mrs. Wicks's dream that she still might see his errors renounced in his delinquencies redeemed. It would all be a sacrifice, under eyes that would miss no faintest shade, to what even the strange frequenters of her ladyship's earlier period used to call the real good of the little unfortunate. Maisie's head held a suspicion of much that, during the last long interval, had confusedly, but quite candidly, come and gone in his own. A glimpse, almost awe-stricken in its gratitude, of the miracle her old governess had wrought. That functionary could not, and this connection have been more impressive, even at second hand, if she had been a profitece with an open scroll or some ardent abyss speaking with the lips of the church. She had clung day by day to their plastic associate, plying him with her deep, narrow passion, doing her simple utmost to convert him, and so working on him that he had at last really embraced his fine chance. That the chance was not delusive was sufficiently guaranteed by the completeness with which he could finally figure it out, that, in the case of his taking action, neither Ida nor Beale, whose book on each side it would only too well suit, would make any sort of row. It sounds no doubt too penetrating, but it was not all as an effect of Sir Claude's betrayals that Maisie was able to piece together the beauty of the special influence through which, for such stretches of time, he had refined upon propriety by keeping, so far as possible, his sentimental interests distinct. She had ever of course in her mind fewer names than conceptions, but it was only with this drawback that she now made out her companion's absences to have had for their ground that he was the lover of her stepmother, and that the lover of her stepmother could scarce logically pretend to a superior right to look after her. Maisie had by this time embraced the implication of a kind of natural divergence between lovers and little girls. It was just this, indeed, that could throw light on the probable contents of the penciled note deposited on the hall-table in the regents' park, and which would greet Mrs. Beale on her return. Maisie freely figured it as provisionally jocular in tone, even though to herself on this occasion Sir Claude turned a graver face than he had shown in any crisis, but that of putting her into the cab when she had been horrid to him after her parting with the captain. He might really be embarrassed, but he would be sure, to her view, to have muffled in some bravado of pleasantry the disturbance produced at her father's by the removal of a valued servant. Not that there wasn't a great deal, too, that wouldn't be in the note, a great deal for which a more comfortable place was Maisie's light little brain, where it hummed away hour after hour and caused the first outlook at Folkston to swim in a softness of colour and sound. It became clear in this medium that her stepfather had really now only to take into account his entanglement with Mrs. Beale. Wasn't he at last disentangled from every one and everything else? The obstacle to the rupture pressed upon him by Mrs. Wicks in the interest of his virtue would be simply that he was in love, or rather, to put it more precisely, that Mrs. Beale had left him no doubt of the degree in which she was. She was so much so as to have succeeded in making him accept for a time, her infatuated grasp of him, and even to some extent the idea of what they yet might do together with a little diplomacy and a good deal of patience. I may not even answer for it that Maisie was not aware of how, in this, Mrs. Beale failed to share his all but insurmountable distaste for there allowing their little charge to breed the air of their gross irregularity, his contention in a word that they should either cease to be irregular or cease to be parental. Their little charge, for herself, had long ago adopted the view that even Mrs. Wicks had at one time not thought prohibitively course, the view that she was, after all, as a little charge, morally at home in atmospheres it would be appalling to analyze. If Mrs. Wicks, however, ultimately appalled, had now set her heart on strong measures, Maisie, as I have intimated, could also work round both to the reasons for them and to the quite other reasons for that lady's not, as yet at least, appearing in them at first hand. Oh, decidedly, I shall never get you to believe the number of things she saw and the number of secrets she discovered. Why in the world, for instance, couldn't Sir Claude have kept it from her, except on the hypothesis of his caring not to, that when you came to look at it, and so far as it was a question of vested interests, he had quite as much right in her as her stepmother, not to say a right that Mrs. Biel was in no position to dispute. He failed at all events of any such successful ambiguity as could keep her, when once they began to look across at France, from regarding even what was least explained as most in the spirit of their old happy times—their rambles and expeditions in the easier, better days of their first acquaintance. Never before had she so had the sense of giving him a lead for the sort of treatment of what was between them that would best carry it off, or of his being grateful to her for meeting him so much in the right place. She met him literally at the very point where Mrs. Biel was most to be reckoned with—the point of the jealousy that was sharp in that lady, and of the need of their keeping it, as long as possible, obscure to her that poor Mrs. Wicks had still a hand. Yes, she met him too in the truth of the matter that, as her stepmother had had no one else to be jealous of, she had made up for so gross approvation by directing the sentiment to a moral influence. Mr. Claude appeared absolutely to convey in a wink that a moral influence capable of pulling a string was, after all, a moral influence exposed to the scratching out of its eyes, and that, this being the case, there was somebody they couldn't afford to leave unprotected before they should see a little better what Mrs. Biel was likely to do. Maisie, true enough, had not to put it into words to rejoin, in the coffee-room, at luncheon. What can she do, but come to you if papa does take a step that will amount to legal desertion? Whether had he then, in answer, to articulate anything but the jollity of their having found a table at a window, from which, as they partook of cold beef and a pollinaris, for he hinted they would have to save lots of money, they could let their eyes have retenderly on the far-off white cliffs that had so often signalled to the embarrassed English a promise of safety. Maisie stared at them, as if she might really make out, after a little, a queer, dear figure perched on them, a figure as to which she had already the subtle sense that, were ever perched, it would be the very oddest yet seen in France. But it was as least as exciting to feel where Mrs. Wicks wasn't, as it would have been to know where she was, and if she wasn't yet at Beloyne, this only thickened the plot. If she was not to be seen that day, however, the evening was marked by an apparition before which, none the less, overstrained suspense folded on the spot its wings. Using her respirations and attaching under-dropped lashes, all her thoughts to a smartness of frock and frill, for which she could reflect that she had not appealed in vain to a loyalty in Susan Ash, triumphant over the nice things their feverish flight had left behind, Maisie spent on a bench in the garden of the hotel, the half-hour before dinner, that mysterious ceremony of the table d'hote, for which she had prepared with the punctuality of flutter. Sir Claude, beside her, was occupied with a cigarette and the afternoon papers. And though the hotel was full, the garden showed the particular void that ensues upon the sound of the dressing-bell. She had almost had time to weary of the human scene. Her own humanity, at any rate, in the shape of a smudge on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she raised her eyes they rested on a high, fair drapery by which smudges were put to shame, and which had glided toward her over the grass without her noting its rustle. She followed up its stiff sheen, up and up from the ground, where it had stopped, till at the end of a considerable journey her impression felt the shock of the fixed face, which, surmounting it, seemed to offer the climax of the dressed condition. Why, mamma! She cried the next instant, cried in atone that, as she sprang to her feet, brought Sir Claude to his own beside her, and gave her ladyship a few yards off the advantage of their momentary confusion. Poor Maisie's was immense. Her mother's drop had the effect of one of the iron shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she had seen suddenly, at the touch of a spring, rattle down over shining shopfronts. The light of foreign travel was darkened at a stroke. She had a horrible sense that they were caught, and for the first time of her life in Ida's presence she had so far translated an impulse into an invidious act as to clutch straight at the hand of her responsible confederate. It didn't help her that he appeared at first equally hushed with horror. A minute during which, in the empty garden, with its long shadows on the lawn, its blue sea over the hedge, and its startled peace in the air, both her elders remained as stiff as tall tumblers filled to the brim, and held straight for fear of a spill. At last, in atone that enriched the whole surprise by its unexpected softness, her mother said to Sir Claude, Do you mind at all my speaking to her? Oh, no! Do you?" His reply was so long and coming that Maisie was the first to find the right note. He laughed as he seemed to take it from her, and she felt a sufficient concession in his manner of addressing their visitor. How in the world did you know we were here? His wife, at this, came the rest of the way, and sat down on the bench with a hand laid on her daughter, whom she gracefully drew to her, and in whom, at her touch, the fear just kindled gave a second jump, but now in quite another direction. Sir Claude, on the further side, resumed his seat and his newspapers, so that the three grouped themselves like a family party, his connection in the oddest way in the world, almost cynically and in a flash acknowledged, and the mother patting the child into conformity's unspeakable. Maisie could already feel how little it was Sir Claude and she who were caught. She had the positive sense of their catching their relative, catching her in the act of getting rid of her burden with a finality that showed her as unprecedentedly relaxed. Oh, yes, the fear had dropped, and she had never been so irrevocably parted with, as in the pressure of possession, now supremely exerted by Ida's long gloved and much bangled arm. I went to the regents' park. This was presently her ladyship's answer to Sir Claude. Do you mean to-day? This morning, just after your own call there. That's how I found you out. That's what has brought me. Sir Claude considered and Maisie waited. Whom then did you see? Ida gave a sound of indulgent mockery. I like your scare. I know your game. I didn't see the person I risked seeing, but I had been ready to take my chance of her. She addressed herself to Maisie. She had encircled her more closely. I asked for you, my dear, but I saw no one but a dirty parlor-mate. She was red in the face with the great things that, as she told me, had just happened in the absence of her mistress, and she luckily had the sense to have made out the place to which Sir Claude had come to take you. If he hadn't given a false scent, I should find you here. That was the supposition on which I've preceded. Ida had never been so explicit about proceeding or supposing, and Maisie, drinking this in, noted too how Sir Claude shared her fine impression of it. I wanted to see you, his wife continued, and now you can judge of the trouble I've taken. I had everything to do in town to-day, but I managed to get off. Maisie and her companion for a moment did justice to this achievement, but Maisie was the first to express it. I'm glad you wanted to see me, mamma. Then after a concentration more deep with a plunge more brave, a little more need have been too late. It stuck in her throat, but she brought it out. We're going to France. Ida was magnificent. Ida kissed her on the forehead. That's just what I thought likely. It made me decide to run down. I fancied that in spite of your scramble you'd wait to cross, and it added to the reason I have for seeing you. Maisie wondered intensely what the reason could be, but she knew ever so much better than to ask. She was slightly surprised, indeed, to perceive that Sir Claude didn't, and to hear him immediately inquire, What in the name of goodness can you have to say to her? His tone was not exactly rude, but it was impatient enough to make his wife's response a fresh specimen of the new softness. That, my dear man, is all my own business. Do you mean, Sir Claude asked, that you wish me to leave you with her? Yes, if you'll be so good. That's the extraordinary request I take the liberty of making. Her ladyship had dropped into a mildness of irony, by which for a moment poor Maisie was mystified and charmed, puzzled with a glimpse of something that in all the years had at intervals peeped out. Ides smiled at Sir Claude with the strange air she had on such occasions of defying and interlock at her to keep it up as long. Her huge eyes, her red lips, the intense marks in her face, formed an éclairage as distinct and public as a lamp set in a window. The child seemed quite to see it in the very beacon that had lighted her path. She suddenly found herself reflecting that it was no wonder the gentlemen were guided. This must have been the way Mamma had first looked at Sir Claude. It brought back the luster of the time they had outlived. It must have been the way she looked also at Mr. Perriam and Lord Eric. Above all it contributed in Maisie's mind to a completeer view of that satisfied state of the captain. Our young lady grasped this idea with a quick lifting of the heart. There was a stillness during which her mother flooded her with a wealth of support to the captain's striking tribute. This stillness remained long enough unbroken to represent that Sir Claude, too, might but be gasping again under the spell originally strong for him, so that Maisie quite hoped he would at least say something to show a recognition of how charming she could be. What he pleasantly said was, "'Are you putting up for the night?' His wife cast grandly about. "'Not here. I've come from Dover.' Over Maisie's head, at this, they still faced each other. You spend the night there.' "'Yes, I brought some things. I went to the hotel and hastily arranged. Then I caught the train that whisked me on here. You see what a day I've had of it.' The statement may surprise, but these were really as obliging if not as lucid words as, in her daughter's ears at least, Ida's lips had ever dropped, and there was a quick desire in the daughter that, for the hour at any rate, they should duly be welcomed as a ground of intercourse. Certainly Mamma had a charm which, when turned on, became a large explanation, and the only danger now in an impulse to applaud it would be that of appearing to signalize its rarity. Maisie, however, risked the peril and the geniality of an admission that Ida had indeed had a rush, and she invited Sir Claude to expose himself by agreeing with her that the rush had been even worse than theirs. He appeared to meet this appeal by saying with detachment enough, "'You go back there to-night.' "'Oh, yes. There are plenty of trains.' Again, Sir Claude hesitated, it would have been hard to say if the child between them more connected or divided them. Then he brought out quietly. It will be late for you to knock about. I'll see you over.' "'You needn't trouble, thank you. I think you won't deny that I can help myself, and that it isn't the first time in my dreadful life that I've somehow managed it.' "'Save for this illusion to her dreadful life,' they talked there,' Maisie noted, as if they were only rather superficial friends, a special effect that she often wondered at before in the midst of what she supposed to be intimacies. This effect was augmented by the almost casual manner in which her ladyship went on. "'I dare say I shall go abroad.' "'From Dover, do you mean? Straight.' "'How straight? I can't say. I'm excessively ill.' This, for a minute, struck Maisie as but part of the conversation, at the end of which time she became aware that it ought to strike her, though it apparently didn't strike Sir Claude, as a part of something graver. It helped her to twist nearer. "'Ill, Mama? Really ill?' She regretted her, really, as soon as she had spoken it, but there couldn't be a better proof of her mother's present polish than that Ida showed no gleam of a temper to take it up. She had taken up at other times much tinier things. She only pressed Maisie's head against her bosom and said, "'Shockingly, my dear, I must go to that new place.' "'What new place?' Sir Claude inquired. Ida thought, but couldn't recall it. "'Oh! Shows, don't you know, where everyone goes? I want some proper treatment. It's all I've ever asked for on earth. But that's not what I came to say.' Sir Claude, in silence, folded one by one his newspapers, then he rose and stood whacking the palm of his hand with the bundle. "'You'll stop and dine with us.' "'Dear no! I can't dine at this sort of hour. I ordered dinner at Dover. Her ladyship's tone in this one instance showed a certain superiority to those conditions in which her daughter had artlessly found folkst and a paradise. It was yet not so crushing as to nip in the bud the eagerness with which the latter broke out. But won't you at least have a cup of tea?' Ida kissed her again on the brow. "'Thanks, love. I had tea before coming.' She raised her eyes to Sir Claude. She is sweet.' He made no more answer than if he didn't agree, but Maisie was at ease about that and was still taken up with the joy of this happier pitch of their talk, which put more and more of a meaning into the captain's version of her ladyship and literally kindled a conjecture that such an admirer might, over there at the other place, be waiting for her to dine. Was the same conjecture in Sir Claude's mind? He partly puzzled her, if it had risen there, by the slight perversity with which he returned to a question that his wife evidently thought she had disposed of. He whacked his hand again with his paper. I had really much better take you." "'And leave Maisie here alone.' Mama so clearly didn't want it that Maisie leaped at the vision of a captain who had seen her on from Dover, and who, while he waited to take her back, would be hovering just at the same distance at which, in Kensington Gardens, the companion of his walk had herself hovered. Of course, however, instead of breathing any such guess, she let Sir Claude reply, all the more that his reply could contribute so much to her own present grandeur. She won't be alone when she has a maid in attendance. Maisie had never before had so much of a retinue, and she waited also to enjoy the action of it on her ladyship. "'You mean the woman you brought from town?' Ida considered. The person at the house spoke of her in a way that scarcely made her out company for my child. Her tone was that her child had never wanted in her hands for prodigious company, but she as distinctly continued to decline Sir Claude's. "'Don't be an old goose,' she said charmingly, "'leave us alone.' In front of them on the grass he looked graver than Maisie at all now thought the occasion warranted. "'I don't see why you can't say it before me.' His wife smoothed one of her daughter's curls. "'Say what, dear? Why what you came to say?' At this Maisie at last interposed. She appealed to Sir Claude. "'Do let her say it to me.' He looked hard for a moment at his little friend. How do you know what she may say? "'She must risk it,' Ida remarked. "'I only want to protect you,' he continued to the child. "'You want to protect yourself? That's what you mean?' His wife replied. "'Don't be afraid. I won't touch you.' "'She won't touch you. She won't,' Maisie declared. She felt by this time that she could really answer for it, and something of the emotion with which she had listened to the captain came back to her. It made her so happy and so secure that she could positively patronize Mamma. She did so in the captain's very language. "'She's good. She's good,' she proclaimed. "'Oh, Lord!' Sir Claude at this let himself go. He appeared to have emitted some sound of derision that was smothered to Maisie's ears by her being again embraced by his wife. Ida released her and held her off a little, looking at her with a very queer face. Then the child became aware that their companion had left them, and that from the face in question a confirmatory remark had preceded. "'I am good, love,' said her ladyship. End of CHAPTER XXII A good deal of the rest of Ida's visit was devoted to explaining, as it were, so extraordinary a statement. This explanation was more copious than any she had yet indulged in, and as the summer twilight gathered and she kept her child in the garden, she was conciliatory to a degree that let her need to arrange things a little perceptibly peep out. It was not merely that she explained, she almost conversed. All that was wanting was that she should have positively shattered a little less. It was really the occasion of Maisie's life on which her mother was to have most to say to her. That alone was an implication of generosity and virtue, and no great stretch was required to make our young lady feel that she should best meet her, and soonest have it over, by simply seeming struck with the propriety of her contention. They sat together while the parents' gloved hand sometimes rested sociably on the child's, and sometimes gave a corrective pull to a ribbon too meager or a tress too thick. And Maisie was conscious of the effort to keep out of her eyes the wonder with which they were occasionally moved to blink. Oh, there would have been things to blink at if one had let oneself go, and it was lucky they were alone together, without Sir Claude or Mrs. Wicks or even Mrs. Beale to catch an imprudent glance. Though profuse and prolonged, her ladyship was not exhaustively lucid, and her account of her situation, so far as it could be called descriptive, was a muddle of inconsequent things, bruised fruit of an occasion she had rather too lightly affronted. None of them were really thought out, and some were even not wholly insincere. It was as if she had asked outright what better proof could have been wanted of her goodness and her greatness than just this marvellous consent to give up what she had so cherished. It was as if she had said in so many words, There have been things between us, between Sir Claude and me, which I needn't go into, you little nuisance, because you wouldn't understand them. It suited her to convey that Maisie had been kept, so far as she was concerned, or could imagine, in a holy ignorance, and that she must take for granted a supreme simplicity. She turned this way and that in the predicament she had sought, and from which she could neither retreat with grace, nor merge with credit. She draped herself in the tatters of her impudence, postured to her utmost before the last little triangle of cracked glass, to which so many fractures had reduced the polished plate of filial superstition. If neither Sir Claude nor Mrs. Wicks was there, this was perhaps all the more pity. The scene had a style of its own that would have qualified it for presentation, especially at such a moment as that of her letting it betray that she'd quite did think her wretched offspring better placed with Sir Claude than in her own soiled hands. There was at any rate nothing scant either in her admission, or her perversions. The mixture of her fear of what Maisie might undiscoverably think, and of the support she at the same time gathered from a necessity of selfishness and a habit of brutality. This habit flushed through the merit she now made in terms explicit of not having come to Folkston to kick up a vulgar row. She had not come to box any ears or to bang any doors, or even to use any language. She had come at the worst to lose the thread of her argument in an occasional dumb, disgusted twitch of the togery in which Mrs. Beale's low domestic had had the impudence to serve up, Miss Farage. She checked all criticism, not committing herself even so far as for those missing comforts of the schoolroom on which Mrs. Wicks had presumed. I am good. I'm crazily, criminally good. But it won't do for you any more, and if I've ceased to contend with him, and with you too, who've made most of the trouble between us, it's for reasons that you'll understand one of these days but too well, one of these days when I hope you'll know what it is to have lost a mother. I'm awfully ill, but you mustn't ask me anything about it. If I don't get off somewhere, my doctor won't answer for the consequences. He's stupefied at what I've borne. He says it had been put on me because I was formed to suffer. I'm thinking of South Africa, but that's none of your business. You must take your choice. You can't ask me questions if you are so ready to give me up. No, I won't tell you. You can find out for yourself. South Africa's wonderful, they say, and if I do go it must be to give it a fair trial. It must be either one thing or the other. If he takes you, you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow for you. I can follow you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last, while there's still a handful left of me. I'm very, very ill. I'm very, very tired. I'm very, very determined. There you have it. Make the most of it. Oh! Your frock's too filthy. But I came to sacrifice myself. Maisie looked at the peckant places. There were moments when it was a relief for her to drop her eyes even on anything so sorted. All her interviews, all her ordeals with her mother had, as she had grown older, seemed to have, before any other, the hard quality of duration. But longer than any, strangely, were these minutes offered to her as so pacific and so agreeably winding up the connection. It was her anxiety that made them long, her fear of some hitch, some check of the current, one of her ladyship's famous quick jumps. She held her breath. She only wanted, by playing into her visitor's hands, to see the thing through. But her impatience itself made at instance the whole situation swim. There were things Ida said that she perhaps didn't hear, and there were things she heard that Ida perhaps didn't say. You're all I have, and yet I'm capable of this. Your father wishes you were dead. That, my dear, is what your father wishes. You'll have to get used to it, as I've done. I mean to his wishing that I'm dead. At all events you see for yourself how wonderful I am to Sir Claude. He wishes me dead quite as much, and I'm sure that if making me scenes about you could have killed me. It was the mark of Ida's eloquence that she started more hairs than she followed, and she gave but a glance in the direction of this one. Going on to say that the very proof of her treating her husband like an angel was that he had just stolen off not to be fairly shamed. She spoke as if he had retired on tiptoe, as he might have withdrawn from a place of worship in which he was not fit to be present. You'll never know what I've been through about you. Never, never, never. I spare you everything as I always have, though I dare say you know things that, if I did, I mean if I knew them, would make me—well, no matter. You're old enough at any rate to know that there are a lot of things I don't say that I easily might. Though it would do me good I assure you to have spoken my mind for once in my life. I don't speak of your father's infamous wife. That may give you a notion of the way I'm letting you off. When I say you, I mean your precious friends and backers. If you don't do justice to my forbearing out of delicacy to mention, just as a last word, about your stepfather, a little fact or two of a kind that really I should only have to mention to shine myself in comparison, and after every calumny like pure gold. If you don't do me that justice you'll never do me justice at all. Macy's desire to show what justice she did her had by this time become so intense as to have brought with it an inspiration. The great effect of their encounter had been to confirm her sense of being launched with Sir Claude, to make it rich and full beyond anything she had dreamed, and everything now conspired to suggest that a single soft touch of her small hand would complete the good work and set her ladyship so promptly and majestically afloat as to leave the great sea-way clear for the morrow. This was the more the case as her hand had for some moments been rendered free by a marked maneuver of both of her mothers. One of these capricious members had fumbled with visible impatience in some backward depth of drapery, and had presently reappeared with a small article in its grasp. The act had a significance for a little person trained in that relation from an early age to keep an eye on manual motions, and its possible bearing was not darkened by the memory of the handful of gold that Susan Ash would never, never believe Mrs. Beale had sent back. Not she—she's too false and too greedy—to the munificent countess. To have guessed, none the less, that her ladyship's purse might be the real figure of the object extracted from the rustling covert at her rear, this suspicion gave on the spot to the child's eyes a direction carefully distant. It added moreover to the optimism that for an hour could ruffle the surface of her deep diplomacy, ruffle it to the point of making her forget that she had never been safe unless she had also been stupid. She in short forgot her habitual caution in her impulse to adopt her ladyship's practical interests, and show her ladyship how perfectly she understood them. She saw without looking that her mother pressed a little clasp, heard, without wanting to, the sharp click that marked the closing portemonnais from which something had been taken. What this was, she just didn't see—it was not too substantial to be locked with ease in the fold of her ladyship's fingers. Nothing was less new to Maisie than the art of not thinking singly, so that at this instant she could both bring out what was on her tongue's end, and weigh, as to the object in her mother's palm, the question of its being a sovereign against the question of its being a shilling. No sooner has she begun to speak that she saw that within a few seconds this question would have been settled. She had foolishly checked the rising words of the little speech of presentation, to which, under the circumstances, even such a high pride as Ida's had had to give some thought. She had checked it completely—that was the next thing she felt. The note she sounded brought into her companion's eyes a look that quickly enough seemed at variance with presentations. That was what the captain said to me that day, mamma. I think it would have given you pleasure to hear the way he spoke of you. The pleasure, Maisie could now in consternation reflect, would have been a long time coming, if it had come no faster than the response evoked by her allusion to it. Her mother gave her one of the looks that slammed the door in her face. Never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had Maisie had to take, such a stare. It reminded her of the way that once, at one of the lectures in Glower Street, something in a big jar that, amid an array of strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a beautiful yellow, was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry on that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment sorryer for herself. Oh, nothing had ever made for twinges like mamma's manner of saying— THE CAPTAIN? WHAT CAPTAIN? Why, when we met you in the gardens, the one who took me to sit with him, that was exactly what he said. Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost thread. What on earth did he say? Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. What you say, mamma, that you're so good. What I say? Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. I say, you're a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth. This was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only feel on the spot that everything had broken short off, and that their communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. What business have you to speak to me of him? Her daughter turned scarlet. I thought you liked him. Him? The biggest cad in London. Her ladyship towered again, and in the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge. Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them, and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as anyone could look down. Well, he was kind about you then. He was, and it made me like him. He said things. They are beautiful, they were—they were! She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for even in the midst of her surge of passion, of which, in fact, it was a part, there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious, of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully saw—saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. I've thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him—with him. Here in her emotion it failed her, the breath of her filial hope. But Ida got it out of her. You hoped, you little horror? That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you—I mean, to South Africa, Maisie said, with another drop. Ida's stupefaction on this kept her silent unnaturally long, so long that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but perfectly measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality. She loomed there in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb. Her wrath was clearly still, as it had always been, a thing of resource and variety. What Maisie least expected of it was by this law what now occurred. It melted in the summer twilight, gradually into pity, and the pity, after a little found, a cadence to which the renewed click of her purse gave an accent. She had put back what she had taken out. You're a dreadful, dismal, deplorable little thing," she murmured. And with this she turned back and rustled away over the lawn. After she had disappeared, Maisie dropped upon the bench again, and for some time in the empty garden and the deeper dusk, sad and stared at the image her flight had still left standing. It had ceased to be her mother only, in the strangest way, that it might become her father, the father of whose wish that she were dead, the announcement still lingered in the air. It was a presence with vague edges. It continued to front her, to cover her. But what reality that she need reckon with did it represent if Mr. Farange were, on his side, also going off, going off to America with the Countess, or even only to Spa? That question had, from the house, a sudden gay answer in the great roar of a gong, and at the same moment she saw Sir Claude look out for her from the wide lighted doorway. At this she went to him, and he came forward and met her on the lawn. For a minute she was with him there in silence, as just before, at the last, she had been with her mother. She's gone? She's gone. Nothing more for the instant passed between them but to move together to the house, where in the hall he indulged in one of those sudden pleasantries, with which, to the delight of his stepdaughter, his native animation overflowed. Will Miss Farange do me the honour to accept my arm? There was nothing in all her days that Miss Farange had accepted with such bliss a bright, rich element that floated them together to their feast. Before they reached which, however, she uttered in the spirit of a glad young lady taken into her first dinner a sociable word that made him stop short. She goes to South Africa. To South Africa! His face, for a moment, seemed to swing for a jump. The next it took its spring into the extreme of hilarity. Is that what she said? Oh, yes, I didn't mistake! Maisie took to herself that credit. For the climate! Sir Claude was now looking at a young woman with black hair, a red frock, and a tiny terrier tucked under her elbow. She swept past them on her way to the dining-room, leaving an impression of a strong scent which mingled amid the clatter of the place with the hot aroma of food. He had become a little graver. He still stopped to talk. I see. I see. Other people brushed by. He was not too grave to notice them. Did she say anything else? Oh, yes, a lot more. On this he met her eyes again with some intensity, but only repeating, I see, I see. Maisie had still her own vision which she brought out. I thought she was going to give me something. What kind of a thing? Some money that she took out of her purse, and then put back. Sir Claude's amusement reappeared. Because she thought better of it, dear, thrifty soul. How much did she make by that maneuver? Maisie considered. I didn't see. It was very small. Sir Claude threw back his head. Do you mean very little? Sixpence. Maisie resented this almost as if at dinner she were already bandying jokes with an agreeable neighbor. It may have been a sovereign. Or even, Sir Claude suggested, a ten-pound note. She flushed at this sudden picture of what she had perhaps lost, and he made it more vivid by adding, Rolled up in a tight little ball, you know, her way of treating banknotes as if they were curl-papers. Maisie's flush deepened both with the immense plausibility of this, and with a fresh wave of the consciousness that was always there to remind her of his cleverness, the consciousness of how immeasurably more, after all, he knew about mamma than she. She had lived with her so many times without discovering the material of her curl-papers, or assisting at any other of her dealings with banknotes. The tight little ball had, at any rate, rolled away from her forever, quite like one of the other balls that Ida's queue used to send flying. Sir Claude gave her his arm again, and by the time she was seated at table, she had perfectly made up her mind as to the amount of the sum she had forfeited. Everything about her, however, the crowded room, the bedisoned banquet, the savor of dishes, the drama of figures, ministered to the joy of life. After dinner she spoke with her friend, for that was exactly what she felt she did, on a porch, a kind of terrace, where the red tips of cigars and the light dresses of ladies made, under the happy stars, a poetry that was almost intoxicating. They talked but little, and she was slightly surprised at his asking for no more news of what her mother had said, but she had no need of talk. There were a sense and a sound in everything to which words had nothing to add. They smoked and smoked, and there was a sweetness in her stepfather's silence. At last he said, "'Let us take another turn, but you must go to bed soon. Oh, you know we're going to have a system.'" Their turn was back into the garden, along the dusky paths from which they could see the black mass and the red lights of boats, and hear the calls and cries that evidently had to do with happy foreign travel, and their system was once more to get on beautifully in this further lounge, without a definite exchange. Yet he finally spoke. He broke out as he tossed away the match from which he had taken a fresh light. "'I must go for a stroll. I'm in a fidget. I must walk it off.'" She fell in with this as she fell in with everything, on which she went on. "'You go up to Miss Ash.'" It was the name they had started. You must see she's not in mischief. Can you find your way alone? "'Oh, yes. I've been up and down seven times.'" She positively enjoyed the prospect of an eighth. Still they didn't separate. They stood smoking together under the stars. Then at last Sir Claude produced it. "'I'm free. I'm free.'" She looked up at him. It was the very spot on which a couple of hours before she had looked up at her mother. "'You're free. You're free.'" To-morrow we go to France. He spoke as if he hadn't heard her. But it didn't prevent her again, concurring. "'To-morrow we go to France.'" Again he appeared not to have heard her, and after a moment—it was an effect evidently of the depth of his reflections and the agitation of his soul—he also spoke as if he had not spoken before. "'I'm free. I'm free.'" She repeated her form of ascent. "'You're free. You're free.'" This time he did hear her. He fixed her through the darkness with a grave face. But he said nothing more. He simply stooped a little and drew her to him. Simply held her a little and kissed her good night. After which, having given her a silent push-up stairs to Miss Ash, he turned round again to the black masts and the red lights. She mounted as if France were at the top. End of Chapter 21