Mrs. Beale gave a last touch; she was ready; she stood there in all her elegance. "I mean, my dear, that it's because he HASN'T got it that I left him."

This opened a view that stretched further than Maisie could reach. She turned away from it, but she spoke before they went out again. "Do you like Mrs. Wix now?"

"Why, my chick, I was just going to ask you if you think she has come at all to like poor bad me!"

Maisie thought, at this hint; but unsuccessfully. "I haven't the least idea. But I'll find out."

"Do!" said Mrs. Beale, rustling out with her in a scented air and as if it would be a very particular favour.

The child tried promptly at bed-time, relieved now of the fear that their visitor would wish to separate her for the night from her attendant. "Have you held out?" she began as soon as the two doors at the end of the passage were again closed on them.

Mrs. Wix looked hard at the flame of the candle. "Held out—?"

"Why, she has been making love to you. Has she won you over?"

Mrs. Wix transferred her intensity to her pupil's face. "Over to what?"

"To HER keeping me instead."

"Instead of Sir Claude?" Mrs. Wix was distinctly gaining time.

"Yes; who else? since it's not instead of you."

Mrs. Wix coloured at this lucidity. "Yes, that IS what she means."

"Well, do you like it?" Maisie asked.

She actually had to wait, for oh her friend was embarrassed! "My opposition to the connexion—theirs—would then naturally to some extent fall. She has treated me to-day as if I weren't after all quite such a worm; not that I don't know very well where she got the pattern of her politeness. But of course," Mrs. Wix hastened to add, "I shouldn't like her as THE one nearly so well as him."

"'Nearly so well!'" Maisie echoed. "I should hope indeed not." She spoke with a firmness under which she was herself the first to quiver. "I thought you 'adored' him."

"I do," Mrs. Wix sturdily allowed.

"Then have you suddenly begun to adore her too?"

Mrs. Wix, instead of directly answering, only blinked in support of her sturdiness. "My dear, in what a tone you ask that! You're coming out."

"Why shouldn't I? YOU'VE come out. Mrs. Beale has come out. We each have our turn!" And Maisie threw off the most extraordinary little laugh that had ever passed her young lips.

There passed Mrs. Wix's indeed the next moment a sound that more than matched it. "You're most remarkable!" she neighed.

Her pupil, though wholly without aspirations to pertness, barely faltered. "I think you've done a great deal to make me so."

"Very true, I have." She dropped to humility, as if she recalled her so recent self-arraignment.

"Would you accept her then? That's what I ask," said Maisie.

"As a substitute?" Mrs. Wix turned it over; she met again the child's eyes. "She has literally almost fawned upon me."

"She hasn't fawned upon HIM. She hasn't even been kind to him."

Mrs. Wix looked as if she had now an advantage. "Then do you propose to 'kill' her?"

"You don't answer my question," Maisie persisted. "I want to know if you accept her."

Mrs. Wix continued to hedge. "I want to know if YOU do!"

Everything in the child's person, at this, announced that it was easy to know. "Not for a moment."

"Not the two now?" Mrs. Wix had caught on; she flushed with it. "Only him alone?"

"Him alone or nobody."

"Not even ME?" cried Mrs. Wix.

Maisie looked at her a moment, then began to undress. "Oh you're nobody!"



XXIX

Her sleep was drawn out, she instantly recognised lateness in the way her eyes opened to Mrs. Wix, erect, completely dressed, more dressed than ever, and gazing at her from the centre of the room. The next thing she was sitting straight up, wide awake with the fear of the hours of "abroad" that she might have lost. Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"

"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.

"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked stiffly backward. "He's there."

"And you've seen him?"

"No. He's there—he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each other.

"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had used was a flash of diplomacy—to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal, strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs. Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had together a cafe complet in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there—he's there!" she had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently being found in the salon.

"He's there—he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."

"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.

"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she reiterated.

"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.

She waited an instant. "God knows!"

Maisie wondered a little why, or how, God should know; this, however, delayed but an instant her bringing out: "Well, won't she go back?"

"Go back? Never!"

"She'll stay all the same?"

"All the more."

"Then won't Sir Claude go?" Maisie asked.

"Go back—if SHE doesn't?" Mrs. Wix appeared to give this question the benefit of a minute's thought. "Why should he have come—only to go back?"

Maisie produced an ingenious solution. "To MAKE her go. To take her."

Mrs. Wix met it without a concession. "If he can make her go so easily, why should he have let her come?"

Maisie considered. "Oh just to see ME. She has a right."

"Yes—she has a right."

"She's my mother!" Maisie tentatively tittered.

"Yes—she's your mother."

"Besides," Maisie went on, "he didn't let her come. He doesn't like her coming, and if he doesn't like it—"

Mrs. Wix took her up. "He must lump it—that's what he must do! Your mother was right about him—I mean your real one. He has no strength. No—none at all." She seemed more profoundly to muse. "He might have had some even with HER—I mean with her ladyship. He's just a poor sunk slave," she asserted with sudden energy.

Maisie wondered again. "A slave?"

"To his passions."

She continued to wonder and even to be impressed; after which she went on: "But how do you know he'll stay?"

"Because he likes us!"—and Mrs. Wix, with her emphasis of the word, whirled her charge round again to deal with posterior hooks. She had positively never shaken her so.

It was as if she quite shook something out of her. "But how will that help him if we—in spite of his liking!—don't stay?"

"Do you mean if we go off and leave him with her?—" Mrs. Wix put the question to the back of her pupil's head. "It WON'T help him. It will be his ruin. He'll have got nothing. He'll have lost everything. It will be his utter destruction, for he's certain after a while to loathe her."

"Then when he loathes her"—it was astonishing how she caught the idea—"he'll just come right after us!" Maisie announced.

"Never."

"Never?"

"She'll keep him. She'll hold him for ever."

Maisie doubted. "When he 'loathes' her?"

"That won't matter. She won't loathe HIM. People don't!" Mrs. Wix brought up.

"Some do. Mamma does," Maisie contended.

"Mamma does NOT!" It was startling—her friend contradicted her flat. "She loves him—she adores him. A woman knows." Mrs. Wix spoke not only as if Maisie were not a woman, but as if she would never be one. "I know!" she cried.

"Then why on earth has she left him?"

Mrs. Wix hesitated. "He hates HER. Don't stoop so—lift up your hair. You know how I'm affected toward him," she added with dignity; "but you must also know that I see clear."

Maisie all this time was trying hard to do likewise. "Then if she has left him for that why shouldn't Mrs. Beale leave him?"

"Because she's not such a fool!"

"Not such a fool as mamma?"

"Precisely—if you WILL have it. Does it look like her leaving him?" Mrs. Wix enquired. She brooded again; then she went on with more intensity: "Do you want to know really and truly why? So that she may be his wretchedness and his punishment."

"His punishment?"—this was more than as yet Maisie could quite accept. "For what?"

"For everything. That's what will happen: he'll be tied to her for ever. She won't mind in the least his hating her, and she won't hate him back. She'll only hate US."

"Us?" the child faintly echoed.

"She'll hate YOU."

"Me? Why, I brought them together!" Maisie resentfully cried.

"You brought them together." There was a completeness in Mrs. Wix's assent. "Yes; it was a pretty job. Sit down." She began to brush her pupil's hair and, as she took up the mass of it with some force of hand, went on with a sharp recall: "Your mother adored him at first—it might have lasted. But he began too soon with Mrs. Beale. As you say," she pursued with a brisk application of the brush, "you brought them together."

"I brought them together"—Maisie was ready to reaffirm it. She felt none the less for a moment at the bottom of a hole; then she seemed to see a way out. "But I didn't bring mamma together—" She just faltered.

"With all those gentlemen?"—Mrs. Wix pulled her up. "No; it isn't quite so bad as that."

"I only said to the Captain"—Maisie had the quick memory of it—"that I hoped he at least (he was awfully nice!) would love her and keep her."

"And even that wasn't much harm," threw in Mrs. Wix.

"It wasn't much good," Maisie was obliged to recognise. "She can't bear him—not even a mite. She told me at Folkestone."

Mrs. Wix suppressed a gasp; then after a bridling instant during which she might have appeared to deflect with difficulty from her odd consideration of Ida's wrongs: "He was a nice sort of person for her to talk to you about!"

"Oh I LIKE him!" Maisie promptly rejoined; and at this, with an inarticulate sound and an inconsequence still more marked, her companion bent over and dealt her on the cheek a rapid peck which had the apparent intention of a kiss.

"Well, if her ladyship doesn't agree with you, what does it only prove?" Mrs. Wix demanded in conclusion. "It proves that she's fond of Sir Claude!"

Maisie, in the light of some of the evidence, reflected on that till her hair was finished, but when she at last started up she gave a sign of no very close embrace of it. She grasped at this moment Mrs. Wix's arm. "He must have got his divorce!"

"Since day before yesterday? Don't talk trash."

This was spoken with an impatience which left the child nothing to reply; whereupon she sought her defence in a completely different relation to the fact. "Well, I knew he would come!"

"So did I; but not in twenty-four hours. I gave him a few days!" Mrs. Wix wailed.

Maisie, whom she had now released, looked at her with interest. "How many did SHE give him?"

Mrs. Wix faced her a moment; then as if with a bewildered sniff: "You had better ask her!" But she had no sooner uttered the words than she caught herself up. "Lord o' mercy, how we talk!"

Maisie felt that however they talked she must see him, but she said nothing more for a time, a time during which she conscientiously finished dressing and Mrs. Wix also kept silence. It was as if they each had almost too much to think of, and even as if the child had the sense that her friend was watching her and seeing if she herself were watched. At last Mrs. Wix turned to the window and stood—sightlessly, as Maisie could guess—looking away. Then our young lady, before the glass, gave the supreme shake. "Well, I'm ready. And now to SEE him!"

Mrs. Wix turned round, but as if without having heard her. "It's tremendously grave." There were slow still tears behind the straighteners.

"It is—it is." Maisie spoke as if she were now dressed quite up to the occasion; as if indeed with the last touch she had put on the judgement-cap. "I must see him immediately."

"How can you see him if he doesn't send for you?"

"Why can't I go and find him?"

"Because you don't know where he is."

"Can't I just look in the salon?" That still seemed simple to Maisie.

Mrs. Wix, however, instantly cut it off. "I wouldn't have you look in the salon for all the world!" Then she explained a little: "The salon isn't ours now."

"Ours?"

"Yours and mine. It's theirs."

"Theirs?" Maisie, with her stare, continued to echo. "You mean they want to keep us out?"

Mrs. Wix faltered; she sank into a chair and, as Maisie had often enough seen her do before, covered her face with her hands. "They ought to, at least. The situation's too monstrous!"

Maisie stood there a moment—she looked about the room. "I'll go to him—I'll find him."

"I won't! I won't go NEAR them!" cried Mrs. Wix.

"Then I'll see him alone." The child spied what she had been looking for—she possessed herself of her hat. "Perhaps I'll take him out!" And with decision she quitted the room.

When she entered the salon it was empty, but at the sound of the opened door some one stirred on the balcony, and Sir Claude, stepping straight in, stood before her. He was in light fresh clothes and wore a straw hat with a bright ribbon; these things, besides striking her in themselves as the very promise of the grandest of grand tours, gave him a certain radiance and, as it were, a tropical ease; but such an effect only marked rather more his having stopped short and, for a longer minute than had ever at such a juncture elapsed, not opened his arms to her. His pause made her pause and enabled her to reflect that he must have been up some time, for there were no traces of breakfast; and that though it was so late he had rather markedly not caused her to be called to him. Had Mrs. Wix been right about their forfeiture of the salon? Was it all his now, all his and Mrs. Beale's? Such an idea, at the rate her small thoughts throbbed, could only remind her of the way in which what had been hers hitherto was what was exactly most Mrs. Beale's and his. It was strange to be standing there and greeting him across a gulf, for he had by this time spoken, smiled and said: "My dear child, my dear child!" but without coming any nearer. In a flash she saw he was different—more so than he knew or designed. The next minute indeed it was as if he caught an impression from her face: this made him hold out his hand. Then they met, he kissed her, he laughed, she thought he even blushed: something of his affection rang out as usual. "Here I am, you see, again—as I promised you."

It was not as he had promised them—he had not promised them Mrs. Beale; but Maisie said nothing about that. What she said was simply: "I knew you had come. Mrs. Wix told me."

"Oh yes. And where is she?"

"In her room. She got me up—she dressed me."

Sir Claude looked at her up and down; a sweetness of mockery that she particularly loved came out in his face whenever he did that, and it was not wanting now. He raised his eyebrows and his arms to play at admiration; he was evidently after all disposed to be gay. "Got you up?—I should think so! She has dressed you most beautifully. Isn't she coming?"

Maisie wondered if she had better tell. "She said not."

"Doesn't she want to see a poor devil?"

She looked about under the vibration of the way he described himself, and her eyes rested on the door of the room he had previously occupied. "Is Mrs. Beale in there?"

Sir Claude looked blankly at the same object. "I haven't the least idea!"

"You haven't seen her?"

"Not the tip of her nose."

Maisie thought: there settled on her, in the light of his beautiful smiling eyes, the faintest purest coldest conviction that he wasn't telling the truth. "She hasn't welcomed you?"

"Not by a single sign."

"Then where is she?"

Sir Claude laughed; he seemed both amused and surprised at the point she made of it. "I give it up!"

"Doesn't she know you've come?"

He laughed again. "Perhaps she doesn't care!"

Maisie, with an inspiration, pounced on his arm. "Has she GONE?"

He met her eyes and then she could see that his own were really much graver than his manner. "Gone?" She had flown to the door, but before she could raise her hand to knock he was beside her and had caught it. "Let her be. I don't care about her. I want to see YOU."

"Then she HASN'T gone?"

Maisie fell back with him. He still looked as if it were a joke, but the more she saw of him the more she could make out that he was troubled. "It wouldn't be like her!"

She stood wondering at him. "Did you want her to come?"

"How can you suppose—?" He put it to her candidly. "We had an immense row over it."

"Do you mean you've quarrelled?"

Sir Claude was at a loss. "What has she told you?"

"That I'm hers as much as yours. That she represents papa."

His gaze struck away through the open window and up to the sky; she could hear him rattle in his trousers-pockets his money or his keys. "Yes—that's what she keeps saying." It gave him for a moment an air that was almost helpless.

"You say you don't care about her," Maisie went on. "DO you mean you've quarrelled?"

"We do nothing in life but quarrel."

He rose before her, as he said this, so soft and fair, so rich, in spite of what might worry him, in restored familiarities, that it gave a bright blur to the meaning—to what would otherwise perhaps have been the palpable promise—of the words.

"Oh YOUR quarrels!" she exclaimed with discouragement.

"I assure you hers are quite fearful!"

"I don't speak of hers. I speak of yours."

"Ah don't do it till I've had my coffee! You're growing up clever," he added. Then he said: "I suppose you've breakfasted?"

"Oh no—I've had nothing."

"Nothing in your room?"—he was all compunction. "My dear old man!—we'll breakfast then together." He had one of his happy thoughts. "I say—we'll go out."

"That was just what I hoped. I've brought my hat."

"You ARE clever! We'll go to a cafe." Maisie was already at the door; he glanced round the room. "A moment—my stick." But there appeared to be no stick. "No matter; I left it—oh!" He remembered with an odd drop and came out.

"You left it in London?" she asked as they went downstairs.

"Yes—in London: fancy!"

"You were in such a hurry to come," Maisie explained.

He had his arm round her. "That must have been the reason."

Halfway down he stopped short again, slapping his leg. "And poor Mrs. Wix?"

Maisie's face just showed a shadow. "Do you want her to come?"

"Dear no—I want to see you alone."

"That's the way I want to see YOU!" she replied. "Like before."

"Like before!" he gaily echoed. "But I mean has she had her coffee?"

"No, nothing."

"Then I'll send it up to her. Madame!" He had already, at the foot of the stair, called out to the stout patronne, a lady who turned to him from the bustling, breezy hall a countenance covered with fresh matutinal powder and a bosom as capacious as the velvet shelf of a chimneypiece, over which her round white face, framed in its golden frizzle, might have figured as a showy clock. He ordered, with particular recommendations, Mrs. Wix's repast, and it was a charm to hear his easy brilliant French: even his companion's ignorance could measure the perfection of it. The patronne, rubbing her hands and breaking in with high swift notes as into a florid duet, went with him to the street, and while they talked a moment longer Maisie remembered what Mrs. Wix had said about every one's liking him. It came out enough through the morning powder, it came out enough in the heaving bosom, how the landlady liked him. He had evidently ordered something lovely for Mrs. Wix. "Et bien soigne, n'est-ce-pas?"

"Soyez tranquille"—the patronne beamed upon him. "Et pour Madame?"

"Madame?" he echoed—it just pulled him up a little.

"Rien encore?"

"Rien encore. Come, Maisie." She hurried along with him, but on the way to the cafe he said nothing.



XXX

After they were seated there it was different: the place was not below the hotel, but further along the quay; with wide, clear windows and a floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that gave it for Maisie something of the added charm of a circus. They had pretty much to themselves the painted spaces and the red plush benches; these were shared by a few scattered gentlemen who picked teeth, with facial contortions, behind little bare tables, and by an old personage in particular, a very old personage with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, whose manner of soaking buttered rolls in coffee and then disposing of them in the little that was left of the interval between his nose and chin might at a less anxious hour have cast upon Maisie an almost envious spell. They too had their cafe au lait and their buttered rolls, determined by Sir Claude's asking her if she could with that light aid wait till the hour of dejeuner. His allusion to this meal gave her, in the shaded sprinkled coolness, the scene, as she vaguely felt, of a sort of ordered mirrored licence, the haunt of those—the irregular, like herself—who went to bed or who rose too late, something to think over while she watched the white-aproned waiter perform as nimbly with plates and saucers as a certain conjurer her friend had in London taken her to a music-hall to see. Sir Claude had presently begun to talk again, to tell her how London had looked and how long he had felt himself, on either side, to have been absent; all about Susan Ash too and the amusement as well as the difficulty he had had with her; then all about his return journey and the Channel in the night and the crowd of people coming over and the way there were always too many one knew. He spoke of other matters beside, especially of what she must tell him of the occupations, while he was away, of Mrs. Wix and her pupil. Hadn't they had the good time he had promised?—had he exaggerated a bit the arrangements made for their pleasure? Maisie had something—not all there was—to say of his success and of their gratitude: she had a complication of thought that grew every minute, grew with the consciousness that she had never seen him in this particular state in which he had been given back.

Mrs. Wix had once said—it was once or fifty times; once was enough for Maisie, but more was not too much—that he was wonderfully various. Well, he was certainly so, to the child's mind, on the present occasion: he was much more various than he was anything else. Besides, the fact that they were together in a shop, at a nice little intimate table as they had so often been in London, only made greater the difference of what they were together about. This difference was in his face, in his voice, in every look he gave her and every movement he made. They were not the looks and the movements he really wanted to show, and she could feel as well that they were not those she herself wanted. She had seen him nervous, she had seen every one she had come in contact with nervous, but she had never seen him so nervous as this. Little by little it gave her a settled terror, a terror that partook of the coldness she had felt just before, at the hotel, to find herself, on his answer about Mrs. Beale, disbelieve him. She seemed to see at present, to touch across the table, as if by laying her hand on it, what he had meant when he confessed on those several occasions to fear. Why was such a man so often afraid? It must have begun to come to her now that there was one thing just such a man above all could be afraid of. He could be afraid of himself. His fear at all events was there; his fear was sweet to her, beautiful and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when, the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose suddenly before her. She rose before her, for that matter, now, and even while their refreshment delayed Maisie arrived at the straight question for which, on their entrance, his first word had given opportunity. "Are we going to have dejeuner with Mrs. Beale?"

His reply was anything but straight. "You and I?"

Maisie sat back in her chair. "Mrs. Wix and me."

Sir Claude also shifted. "That's an enquiry, my dear child, that Mrs. Beale herself must answer." Yes, he had shifted; but abruptly, after a moment during which something seemed to hang there between them and, as it heavily swayed, just fan them with the air of its motion, she felt that the whole thing was upon them. "Do you mind," he broke out, "my asking you what Mrs. Wix has said to you?"

"Said to me?"

"This day or two—while I was away."

"Do you mean about you and Mrs. Beale?"

Sir Claude, resting on his elbows, fixed his eyes a moment on the white marble beneath them. "No; I think we had a good deal of that—didn't we?—before I left you. It seems to me we had it pretty well all out. I mean about yourself, about your—don't you know?—associating with us, as I might say, and staying on with us. While you were alone with our friend what did she say?"

Maisie felt the weight of the question; it kept her silent for a space during which she looked at Sir Claude, whose eyes remained bent. "Nothing," she returned at last.

He showed incredulity. "Nothing?"

"Nothing," Maisie repeated; on which an interruption descended in the form of a tray bearing the preparations for their breakfast. These preparations were as amusing as everything else; the waiter poured their coffee from a vessel like a watering-pot and then made it froth with the curved stream of hot milk that dropped from the height of his raised arm; but the two looked across at each other through the whole play of French pleasantness with a gravity that had now ceased to dissemble. Sir Claude sent the waiter off again for something and then took up her answer. "Hasn't she tried to affect you?"

Face to face with him thus it seemed to Maisie that she had tried so little as to be scarce worth mentioning; again therefore an instant she shut herself up. Presently she found her middle course. "Mrs. Beale likes her now; and there's one thing I've found out—a great thing. Mrs. Wix enjoys her being so kind. She was tremendously kind all day yesterday."

"I see. And what did she do?" Sir Claude asked.

Maisie was now busy with her breakfast, and her companion attacked his own; so that it was all, in form at least, even more than their old sociability. "Everything she could think of. She was as nice to her as you are," the child said. "She talked to her all day."

"And what did she say to her?"

"Oh I don't know." Maisie was a little bewildered with his pressing her so for knowledge; it didn't fit into the degree of intimacy with Mrs. Beale that Mrs. Wix had so denounced and that, according to that lady, had now brought him back in bondage. Wasn't he more aware than his stepdaughter of what would be done by the person to whom he was bound? In a moment, however, she added: "She made love to her."

Sir Claude looked at her harder, and it was clearly something in her tone that made him quickly say: "You don't mind my asking you, do you?"

"Not at all; only I should think you'd know better than I."

"What Mrs. Beale did yesterday?"

She thought he coloured a trifle; but almost simultaneously with that impression she found herself answering: "Yes—if you have seen her."

He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just now I've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"

There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she enquired in a moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"

He received her enquiry as he had received her doubt—with an extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine of course why you think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."

She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back garden at her mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing—high, high, high—that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook. "Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"

"My going away again is just the point. I can't tell yet—it all depends."

"On Mrs. Beale?" Maisie asked. "SHE won't go away." He finished emptying his coffee-cup and then, when he had put it down, leaned back in his chair, where she could see that he smiled on her. This only added to her idea that he was in trouble, that he was turning somehow in his pain and trying different things. He continued to smile and she went on: "Don't you know that?"

"Yes, I may as well confess to you that as much as that I do know. SHE won't go away. She'll stay."

"She'll stay. She'll stay," Maisie repeated.

"Just so. Won't you have some more coffee?"

"Yes, please."

"And another buttered roll?"

"Yes, please."

He signed to the hovering waiter, who arrived with the shining spout of plenty in either hand and with the friendliest interest in mademoiselle. "Les tartines sont la." Their cups were replenished and, while he watched almost musingly the bubbles in the fragrant mixture, "Just so—just so," Sir Claude said again and again. "It's awfully awkward!" he exclaimed when the waiter had gone.

"That she won't go?"

"Well—everything! Well, well, well!" But he pulled himself together; he began again to eat. "I came back to ask you something. That's what I came back for."

"I know what you want to ask me," Maisie said.

"Are you very sure?"

"I'm ALMOST very."

"Well then risk it. You mustn't make ME risk everything."

She was struck with the force of this. "You want to know if I should be happy with THEM."

"With those two ladies only? No, no, old man: vous n'y etes pas. So now—there!" Sir Claude laughed.

"Well then what is it?"

The next minute, instead of telling her what it was, he laid his hand across the table on her own and held her as if under the prompting of a thought. "Mrs. Wix would stay with HER?"

"Without you? Oh yes—now."

"On account, as you just intimated, of Mrs. Beale's changed manner?"

Maisie, with her sense of responsibility, weighed both Mrs. Beale's changed manner and Mrs. Wix's human weakness. "I think she talked her round."

Sir Claude thought a moment. "Ah poor dear!"

"Do you mean Mrs. Beale?"

"Oh no—Mrs. Wix."

"She likes being talked round—treated like any one else. Oh she likes great politeness," Maisie expatiated. "It affects her very much."

Sir Claude, to her surprise, demurred a little to this. "Very much—up to a certain point."

"Oh up to any point!" Maisie returned with emphasis.

"Well, haven't I been polite to her?"

"Lovely—and she perfectly worships you."

"Then, my dear child, why can't she let me alone?"—this time Sir Claude unmistakeably blushed. Before Maisie, however, could answer his question, which would indeed have taken her long, he went on in another tone: "Mrs. Beale thinks she has probably quite broken her down. But she hasn't."

Though he spoke as if he were sure, Maisie was strong in the impression she had just uttered and that she now again produced. "She has talked her round."

"Ah yes; round to herself, but not round to me."

Oh she couldn't bear to hear him say that! "To you? Don't you really believe how she loves you?"

Sir Claude examined his belief. "Of course I know she's wonderful."

"She's just every bit as fond of you as I am," said Maisie. "She told me so yesterday."

"Ah then," he promptly exclaimed, "she HAS tried to affect you! I don't love HER, don't you see? I do her perfect justice," he pursued, "but I mean I don't love her as I do you, and I'm sure you wouldn't seriously expect it. She's not my daughter—come, old chap! She's not even my mother, though I dare say it would have been better for me if she had been. I'll do for her what I'd do for my mother, but I won't do more." His real excitement broke out in a need to explain and justify himself, though he kept trying to correct and conceal it with laughs and mouthfuls and other vain familiarities. Suddenly he broke off, wiping his moustache with sharp pulls and coming back to Mrs. Beale. "Did she try to talk YOU over?"

"No—to me she said very little. Very little indeed," Maisie continued.

Sir Claude seemed struck with this. "She was only sweet to Mrs. Wix?"

"As sweet as sugar!" cried Maisie.

He looked amused at her comparison, but he didn't contest it; he uttered on the contrary, in an assenting way, a little inarticulate sound. "I know what she CAN be. But much good may it have done her! Mrs. Wix won't COME 'round.' That's what makes it so fearfully awkward."

Maisie knew it was fearfully awkward; she had known this now, she felt, for some time, and there was something else it more pressingly concerned her to learn. "What is it you meant you came over to ask me?"

"Well," said Sir Claude, "I was just going to say. Let me tell you it will surprise you." She had finished breakfast now and she sat back in her chair again: she waited in silence to hear. He had pushed the things before him a little way and had his elbows on the table. This time, she was convinced, she knew what was coming, and once more, for the crash, as with Mrs. Wix lately in her room, she held her breath and drew together her eyelids. He was going to say she must give him up. He looked hard at her again; then he made his effort. "Should you see your way to let her go?"

She was bewildered. "To let who—?"

"Mrs. Wix simply. I put it at the worst. Should you see your way to sacrifice her? Of course I know what I'm asking."

Maisie's eyes opened wide again; this was so different from what she had expected. "And stay with you alone?"

He gave another push to his coffee-cup. "With me and Mrs. Beale. Of course it would be rather rum; but everything in our whole story is rather rum, you know. What's more unusual than for any one to be given up, like you, by her parents?"

"Oh nothing is more unusual than THAT!" Maisie concurred, relieved at the contact of a proposition as to which concurrence could have lucidity.

"Of course it would be quite unconventional," Sir Claude went on—"I mean the little household we three should make together; but things have got beyond that, don't you see? They got beyond that long ago. We shall stay abroad at any rate—it's ever so much easier and it's our affair and nobody else's: it's no one's business but ours on all the blessed earth. I don't say that for Mrs. Wix, poor dear—I do her absolute justice. I respect her; I see what she means; she has done me a lot of good. But there are the facts. There they are, simply. And here am I, and here are you. And she won't come round. She's right from her point of view. I'm talking to you in the most extraordinary way—I'm always talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain't I? One would think you were about sixty and that I—I don't know what any one would think I am. Unless a beastly cad!" he suggested. "I've been awfully worried, and this's what it has come to. You've done us the most tremendous good, and you'll do it still and always, don't you see? We can't let you go—you're everything. There are the facts as I say. She IS your mother now, Mrs. Beale, by what has happened, and I, in the same way, I'm your father. No one can contradict that, and we can't get out of it. My idea would be a nice little place—somewhere in the South—where she and you would be together and as good as any one else. And I should be as good too, don't you see? for I shouldn't live with you, but I should be close to you—just round the corner, and it would be just the same. My idea would be that it should all be perfectly open and frank. Honi soit qui mal y pense, don't you know? You're the best thing—you and what we can do for you—that either of us has ever known," he came back to that. "When I say to her 'Give her up, come,' she lets me have it bang in the face: 'Give her up yourself!' It's the same old vicious circle—and when I say vicious I don't mean a pun, a what-d'-ye-call-'em. Mrs. Wix is the obstacle; I mean, you know, if she has affected you. She has affected ME, and yet here I am. I never was in such a tight place: please believe it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't that—to put it so—just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday, in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her own self.' So I do, old girl—I put it to you. CAN you choose freely?"

This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it—I haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well—to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"

"Back to London."

"But I mean what will she do?"

"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our difficulties."

That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been. "Then who'll teach me?"

Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"

She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."

"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one—not of the only kind that would do. It wouldn't do—the kind that WOULD do," he queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay—heigh-ho! We'd do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I CAN now; I haven't got to mind—what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did—she can show out WITH me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."

It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less, while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct—an old woman and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the rampart of the haute ville. It was just at that hour yesterday; they were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.

"I do—I do. But for all that—" And he gave, turning in his conscious exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion could recognise, of the man naturally accustomed to that argument, the man who wanted thoroughly to be reasonable, but who, if really he had to mind so many things, would be always impossibly hampered. What it came to indeed was that he understood quite perfectly. If Mrs. Wix clung it was all the more reason for shaking Mrs. Wix off.

This vision of what she had brought him to occupied our young lady while, to ask what he owed, he called the waiter and put down a gold piece that the man carried off for change. Sir Claude looked after him, then went on: "How could a woman have less to reproach a fellow with? I mean as regards herself."

Maisie entertained the question. "Yes. How COULD she have less? So why are you so sure she'll go?"

"Surely you heard why—you heard her come out three nights ago? How can she do anything but go—after what she then said? I've done what she warned me of—she was absolutely right. So here we are. Her liking Mrs. Beale, as you call it now, is a motive sufficient, with other things, to make her, for your sake, stay on without me; it's not a motive sufficient to make her, even for yours, stay on WITH me—swallow, don't you see? what she can't swallow. And when you say she's as fond of me as you are I think I can, if that's the case, challenge you a little on it. Would YOU, only with those two, stay on without me?"

The waiter came back with the change, and that gave her, under this appeal, a moment's respite. But when he had retreated again with the "tip" gathered in with graceful thanks on a subtle hint from Sir Claude's forefinger, the latter, while pocketing the money, followed the appeal up. "Would you let her make you live with Mrs. Beale?"

"Without you? Never," Maisie then answered. "Never," she said again.

It made him quite triumph, and she was indeed herself shaken by the mere sound of it. "So you see you're not, like her," he exclaimed, "so ready to give me away!" Then he came back to his original question. "CAN you choose? I mean can you settle it by a word yourself? Will you stay on with us without her?" Now in truth she felt the coldness of her terror, and it seemed to her that suddenly she knew, as she knew it about Sir Claude, what she was afraid of. She was afraid of herself. She looked at him in such a way that it brought, she could see, wonder into his face, a wonder held in check, however, by his frank pretension to play fair with her, not to use advantages, not to hurry nor hustle her—only to put her chance clearly and kindly before her. "May I think?" she finally asked.

"Certainly, certainly. But how long?"

"Oh only a little while," she said meekly.

He had for a moment the air of wishing to look at it as if it were the most cheerful prospect in the world. "But what shall we do while you're thinking?" He spoke as if thought were compatible with almost any distraction.

There was but one thing Maisie wished to do, and after an instant she expressed it. "Have we got to go back to the hotel?"

"Do you want to?"

"Oh no."

"There's not the least necessity for it." He bent his eyes on his watch; his face was now very grave. "We can do anything else in the world." He looked at her again almost as if he were on the point of saying that they might for instance start off for Paris. But even while she wondered if that were not coming he had a sudden drop. "We can take a walk."

She was all ready, but he sat there as if he had still something more to say. This too, however, didn't come; so she herself spoke. "I think I should like to see Mrs. Wix first."

"Before you decide? All right—all right." He had put on his hat, but he had still to light a cigarette. He smoked a minute, with his head thrown back, looking at the ceiling; then he said: "There's one thing to remember—I've a right to impress it on you: we stand absolutely in the place of your parents. It's their defection, their extraordinary baseness, that has made our responsibility. Never was a young person more directly committed and confided." He appeared to say this over, at the ceiling, through his smoke, a little for his own illumination. It carried him after a pause somewhat further. "Though I admit it was to each of us separately."

He gave her so at that moment and in that attitude the sense of wanting, as it were, to be on her side—on the side of what would be in every way most right and wise and charming for her—that she felt a sudden desire to prove herself not less delicate and magnanimous, not less solicitous for his own interests. What were these but that of the "regularity" he had just before spoken of? "It WAS to each of you separately," she accordingly with much earnestness remarked. "But don't you remember? I brought you together."

He jumped up with a delighted laugh. "Remember? Rather! You brought us together, you brought us together. Come!"



XXXI

She remained out with him for a time of which she could take no measure save that it was too short for what she wished to make of it—an interval, a barrier indefinite, insurmountable. They walked about, they dawdled, they looked in shop-windows; they did all the old things exactly as if to try to get back all the old safety, to get something out of them that they had always got before. This had come before, whatever it was, without their trying, and nothing came now but the intenser consciousness of their quest and their subterfuge. The strangest thing of all was what had really happened to the old safety. What had really happened was that Sir Claude was "free" and that Mrs. Beale was "free," and yet that the new medium was somehow still more oppressive than the old. She could feel that Sir Claude concurred with her in the sense that the oppression would be worst at the inn, where, till something should be settled, they would feel the want of something—of what could they call it but a footing? The question of the settlement loomed larger to her now: it depended, she had learned, so completely on herself. Her choice, as her friend had called it, was there before her like an impossible sum on a slate, a sum that in spite of her plea for consideration she simply got off from doing while she walked about with him. She must see Mrs. Wix before she could do her sum; therefore the longer before she saw her the more distant would be the ordeal. She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation; she simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She saw nothing that she had seen hitherto—no touch in the foreign picture that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir Claude's hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they would find at the inn. She was certain now that what awaited them there would be to lunch with Mrs. Beale. All her instinct was to avoid that, to draw out their walk, to find pretexts, to take him down upon the beach, to take him to the end of the pier. He said no other word to her about what they had talked of at breakfast, and she had a dim vision of how his way of not letting her see him definitely wait for anything from her would make any one who should know of it, would make Mrs. Wix for instance, think him more than ever a gentleman. It was true that once or twice, on the jetty, on the sands, he looked at her for a minute with eyes that seemed to propose to her to come straight off with him to Paris. That, however, was not to give her a nudge about her responsibility. He evidently wanted to procrastinate quite as much as she did; he was not a bit more in a hurry to get back to the others. Maisie herself at this moment could be secretly merciless to Mrs. Wix— to the extent at any rate of not caring if her continued disappearance did make that lady begin to worry about what had become of her, even begin to wonder perhaps if the truants hadn't found their remedy. Her want of mercy to Mrs. Beale indeed was at least as great; for Mrs. Beale's worry and wonder would be as much greater as the object at which they were directed. When at last Sir Claude, at the far end of the plage, which they had already, in the many-coloured crowd, once traversed, suddenly, with a look at his watch, remarked that it was time, not to get back to the table d'hote, but to get over to the station and meet the Paris papers—when he did this she found herself thinking quite with intensity what Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix WOULD say. On the way over to the station she had even a mental picture of the stepfather and the pupil established in a little place in the South while the governess and the stepmother, in a little place in the North, remained linked by a community of blankness and by the endless series of remarks it would give birth to. The Paris papers had come in and her companion, with a strange extravagance, purchased no fewer than eleven: it took up time while they hovered at the bookstall on the restless platform, where the little volumes in a row were all yellow and pink and one of her favourite old women in one of her favourite old caps absolutely wheedled him into the purchase of three. They had thus so much to carry home that it would have seemed simpler, with such a provision for a nice straight journey through France, just to "nip," as she phrased it to herself, into the coupe of the train that, a little further along, stood waiting to start. She asked Sir Claude where it was going.

"To Paris. Fancy!"

She could fancy well enough. They stood there and smiled, he with all the newspapers under his arm and she with the three books, one yellow and two pink. He had told her the pink were for herself and the yellow one for Mrs. Beale, implying in an interesting way that these were the natural divisions in France of literature for the young and for the old. She knew how prepared they looked to pass into the train, and she presently brought out to her companion: "I wish we could go. Won't you take me?"

He continued to smile. "Would you really come?"

"Oh yes, oh yes. Try."

"Do you want me to take our tickets?"

"Yes, take them."

"Without any luggage?"

She showed their two armfuls, smiling at him as he smiled at her, but so conscious of being more frightened than she had ever been in her life that she seemed to see her whiteness as in a glass. Then she knew that what she saw was Sir Claude's whiteness: he was as frightened as herself. "Haven't we got plenty of luggage?" she asked. "Take the tickets—haven't you time? When does the train go?"

Sir Claude turned to a porter. "When does the train go?"

The man looked up at the station-clock. "In two minutes. Monsieur est place?"

"Pas encore."

"Et vos billets?—vous n'avez que le temps." Then after a look at Maisie, "Monsieur veut-il que je les prenne?" the man said.

Sir Claude turned back to her. "Veux-tu lieu qu'il en prenne?"

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world: in the intensity of her excitement she not only by illumination understood all their French, but fell into it with an active perfection. She addressed herself straight to the porter. "Prenny, prenny. Oh prenny!"

"Ah si mademoiselle le veut—!" He waited there for the money.

But Sir Claude only stared—stared at her with his white face. "You HAVE chosen then? You'll let her go?"

Maisie carried her eyes wistfully to the train, where, amid cries of "En voiture, en voiture!" heads were at windows and doors banging loud. The porter was pressing. "Ah vous n'avez plus le temps!"

"It's going—it's going!" cried Maisie.

They watched it move, they watched it start; then the man went his way with a shrug. "It's gone!" Sir Claude said.

Maisie crept some distance up the platform; she stood there with her back to her companion, following it with her eyes, keeping down tears, nursing her pink and yellow books. She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone. She looked round at last, from where she had paused, at Sir Claude's, and then saw that his wasn't. It sat there with him on the bench to which, against the wall of the station, he had retreated, and where, leaning back and, as she thought, rather queer, he still waited. She came down to him and he continued to offer his ineffectual intention of pleasantry. "Yes, I've chosen," she said to him. "I'll let her go if you—if you—"

She faltered; he quickly took her up. "If I, if I—"

"If you'll give up Mrs. Beale."

"Oh!" he exclaimed; on which she saw how much, how hopelessly he was afraid. She had supposed at the cafe that it was of his rebellion, of his gathering motive; but how could that be when his temptations—that temptation for example of the train they had just lost—were after all so slight? Mrs. Wix was right. He was afraid of his weakness—of his weakness.

She couldn't have told you afterwards how they got back to the inn: she could only have told you that even from this point they had not gone straight, but once more had wandered and loitered and, in the course of it, had found themselves on the edge of the quay where—still apparently with half an hour to spare—the boat prepared for Folkestone was drawn up. Here they hovered as they had done at the station; here they exchanged silences again, but only exchanged silences. There were punctual people on the deck, choosing places, taking the best; some of them already contented, all established and shawled, facing to England and attended by the steward, who, confined on such a day to the lighter offices, tucked up the ladies' feet or opened bottles with a pop. They looked down at these things without a word; they even picked out a good place for two that was left in the lee of a lifeboat; and if they lingered rather stupidly, neither deciding to go aboard nor deciding to come away, it was Sir Claude quite as much as she who wouldn't move. It was Sir Claude who cultivated the supreme stillness by which she knew best what he meant. He simply meant that he knew all she herself meant. But there was no pretence of pleasantry now: their faces were grave and tired. When at last they lounged off it was as if his fear, his fear of his weakness, leaned upon her heavily as they followed the harbour. In the hall of the hotel as they passed in she saw a battered old box that she recognised, an ancient receptacle with dangling labels that she knew and a big painted W, lately done over and intensely personal, that seemed to stare at her with a recognition and even with some suspicion of its own. Sir Claude caught it too, and there was agitation for both of them in the sight of this object on the move. Was Mrs. Wix going and was the responsibility of giving her up lifted, at a touch, from her pupil? Her pupil and her pupil's companion, transfixed a moment, held, in the presence of the omen, communication more intense than in the presence either of the Paris train or of the Channel steamer; then, and still without a word, they went straight upstairs. There, however, on the landing, out of sight of the people below, they collapsed so that they had to sink down together for support: they simply seated themselves on the uppermost step while Sir Claude grasped the hand of his stepdaughter with a pressure that at another moment would probably have made her squeal. Their books and papers were all scattered. "She thinks you've given her up!"

"Then I must see her—I must see her," Maisie said.

"To bid her good-bye?"

"I must see her—I must see her," the child only repeated.

They sat a minute longer, Sir Claude, with his tight grip of her hand and looking away from her, looking straight down the staircase to where, round the turn, electric bells rattled and the pleasant sea-draught blew. At last, loosening his grasp, he slowly got up while she did the same. They went together along the lobby, but before they reached the salon he stopped again. "If I give up Mrs. Beale—?"

"I'll go straight out with you again and not come back till she has gone."

He seemed to wonder. "Till Mrs. Beale—?" He had made it sound like a bad joke.

"I mean till Mrs. Wix leaves—in that boat."

Sir Claude looked almost foolish. "Is she going in that boat?"

"I suppose so. I won't even bid her good-bye," Maisie continued. "I'll stay out till the boat has gone. I'll go up to the old rampart."

"The old rampart?"

"I'll sit on that old bench where you see the gold Virgin."

"The gold Virgin?" he vaguely echoed. But it brought his eyes back to her as if after an instant he could see the place and the thing she named—could see her sitting there alone. "While I break with Mrs. Beale?"

"While you break with Mrs. Beale."

He gave a long deep smothered sigh. "I must see her first."

"You won't do as I do? Go out and wait?"

"Wait?"—once more he appeared at a loss.

"Till they both have gone," Maisie said.

"Giving US up?"

"Giving US up."

Oh with what a face for an instant he wondered if that could be! But his wonder the next moment only made him go to the door and, with his hand on the knob, stand as if listening for voices. Maisie listened, but she heard none. All she heard presently was Sir Claude's saying with speculation quite choked off, but so as not to be heard in the salon: "Mrs. Beale will never go." On this he pushed open the door and she went in with him. The salon was empty, but as an effect of their entrance the lady he had just mentioned appeared at the door of the bedroom. "Is she going?" he then demanded.

Mrs. Beale came forward, closing her door behind her. "I've had the most extraordinary scene with her. She told me yesterday she'd stay."

"And my arrival has altered it?"

"Oh we took that into account!" Mrs. Beale was flushed, which was never quite becoming to her, and her face visibly testified to the encounter to which she alluded. Evidently, however, she had not been worsted, and she held up her head and smiled and rubbed her hands as if in sudden emulation of the patronne. "She promised she'd stay even if you should come."

"Then why has she changed?"

"Because she's a hound. The reason she herself gives is that you've been out too long."

Sir Claude stared. "What has that to do with it?"

"You've been out an age," Mrs. Beale continued; "I myself couldn't imagine what had become of you. The whole morning," she exclaimed, "and luncheon long since over!"

Sir Claude appeared indifferent to that. "Did Mrs. Wix go down with you?" he only asked.

"Not she; she never budged!"—and Mrs. Beale's flush, to Maisie's vision, deepened. "She moped there—she didn't so much as come out to me; and when I sent to invite her she simply declined to appear. She said she wanted nothing, and I went down alone. But when I came up, fortunately a little primed"—and Mrs. Beale smiled a fine smile of battle—"she WAS in the field!"

"And you had a big row?"

"We had a big row"—she assented with a frankness as large. "And while you left me to that sort of thing I should like to know where you were!" She paused for a reply, but Sir Claude merely looked at Maisie; a movement that promptly quickened her challenge. "Where the mischief have you been?"

"You seem to take it as hard as Mrs. Wix," Sir Claude returned.

"I take it as I choose to take it, and you don't answer my question."

He looked again at Maisie—as if for an aid to this effort; whereupon she smiled at her stepmother and offered: "We've been everywhere."

Mrs. Beale, however, made her no response, thereby adding to a surprise of which our young lady had already felt the light brush. She had received neither a greeting nor a glance, but perhaps this was not more remarkable than the omission, in respect to Sir Claude, parted with in London two days before, of any sign of a sense of their reunion. Most remarkable of all was Mrs. Beale's announcement of the pledge given by Mrs. Wix and not hitherto revealed to her pupil. Instead of heeding this witness she went on with acerbity: "It might surely have occurred to you that something would come up."

Sir Claude looked at his watch. "I had no idea it was so late, nor that we had been out so long. We weren't hungry. It passed like a flash. What HAS come up?"

"Oh that she's disgusted," said Mrs. Beale.

"With whom then?"

"With Maisie." Even now she never looked at the child, who stood there equally associated and disconnected. "For having no moral sense."

"How SHOULD she have?" Sir Claude tried again to shine a little at the companion of his walk. "How at any rate is it proved by her going out with me?"

"Don't ask ME; ask that woman. She drivels when she doesn't rage," Mrs. Beale declared.

"And she leaves the child?"

"She leaves the child," said Mrs. Beale with great emphasis and looking more than ever over Maisie's head.

In this position suddenly a change came into her face, caused, as the others could the next thing see, by the reappearance of Mrs. Wix in the doorway which, on coming in at Sir Claude's heels, Maisie had left gaping. "I DON'T leave the child—I don't, I don't!" she thundered from the threshold, advancing upon the opposed three but addressing herself directly to Maisie. She was girded—positively harnessed—for departure, arrayed as she had been arrayed on her advent and armed with a small fat rusty reticule which, almost in the manner of a battle-axe, she brandished in support of her words. She had clearly come straight from her room, where Maisie in an instant guessed she had directed the removal of her minor effects. "I don't leave you till I've given you another chance. Will you come WITH me?"

Maisie turned to Sir Claude, who struck her as having been removed to a distance of about a mile. To Mrs. Beale she turned no more than Mrs. Beale had turned: she felt as if already their difference had been disclosed. What had come out about that in the scene between the two women? Enough came out now, at all events, as she put it practically to her stepfather. "Will YOU come? Won't you?" she enquired as if she had not already seen that she should have to give him up. It was the last flare of her dream. By this time she was afraid of nothing.

"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs. Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.

But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from ME, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.

Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't put it to her THAT way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in which so many of her friends had been "compromised."

This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she took the hint. "No—it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way. "Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and wait there till I can come to you."

Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'M going, but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"

Maisie surveyed—for the idea of a describable loss—the immensity of space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost everything."

Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you HAVE lost what we found together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten what we found together?"

Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"

"Your moral sense. HAVEN'T I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her hand.

It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears she had kept down at the station. They had nothing—no, distinctly nothing—to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know—I don't know."

"Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've killed it when it had begun to live."

She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think I've produced life. I don't know what to call it—I haven't even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever met—it's exquisite, it's sacred." He had his hands in his pockets and, though a trace of the sickness he had just shown perhaps lingered there, his face bent itself with extraordinary gentleness on both the friends he was about to lose. "Do you know what I came back for?" he asked of the elder.

"I think I do!" cried Mrs. Wix, surprisingly un-mollified and with the heat of her late engagement with Mrs. Beale still on her brow. That lady, as if a little besprinkled by such turns of the tide, uttered a loud inarticulate protest and, averting herself, stood a moment at the window.

"I came back with a proposal," said Sir Claude.

"To me?" Mrs. Wix asked.

"To Maisie. That she should give you up."

"And does she?"

Sir Claude wavered. "Tell her!" he then exclaimed to the child, also turning away as if to give her the chance. But Mrs. Wix and her pupil stood confronted in silence, Maisie whiter than ever—more awkward, more rigid and yet more dumb. They looked at each other hard, and as nothing came from them Sir Claude faced about again. "You won't tell her?—you can't?" Still she said nothing; whereupon, addressing Mrs. Wix, he broke into a kind of ecstasy. "She refused—she refused!"

Maisie, at this, found her voice. "I didn't refuse. I didn't," she repeated.

It brought Mrs. Beale straight back to her. "You accepted, angel—you accepted!" She threw herself upon the child and, before Maisie could resist, had sunk with her upon the sofa, possessed of her, encircling her. "You've given her up already, you've given her up for ever, and you're ours and ours only now, and the sooner she's off the better!"

Maisie had shut her eyes, but at a word of Sir Claude's they opened. "Let her go!" he said to Mrs. Beale.

"Never, never, never!" cried Mrs. Beale. Maisie felt herself more compressed.

"Let her go!" Sir Claude more intensely repeated. He was looking at Mrs. Beale and there was something in his voice. Maisie knew from a loosening of arms that she had become conscious of what it was; she slowly rose from the sofa, and the child stood there again dropped and divided. "You're free—you're free," Sir Claude went on; at which Maisie's back became aware of a push that vented resentment and that placed her again in the centre of the room, the cynosure of every eye and not knowing which way to turn.

She turned with an effort to Mrs. Wix. "I didn't refuse to give you up. I said I would if HE'D give up—"

"Give up Mrs. Beale?" burst from Mrs. Wix.

"Give up Mrs. Beale. What do you call that but exquisite?" Sir Claude demanded of all of them, the lady mentioned included; speaking with a relish as intense now as if some lovely work of art or of nature had suddenly been set down among them. He was rapidly recovering himself on this basis of fine appreciation. "She made her condition—with such a sense of what it should be! She made the only right one."

"The only right one?"—Mrs. Beale returned to the charge. She had taken a moment before a snub from him, but she was not to be snubbed on this. "How can you talk such rubbish and how can you back her up in such impertinence? What in the world have you done to her to make her think of such stuff?" She stood there in righteous wrath; she flashed her eyes round the circle. Maisie took them full in her own, knowing that here at last was the moment she had had most to reckon with. But as regards her stepdaughter Mrs. Beale subdued herself to a question deeply mild. "HAVE you made, my own love, any such condition as that?"

Somehow, now that it was there, the great moment was not so bad. What helped the child was that she knew what she wanted. All her learning and learning had made her at last learn that; so that if she waited an instant to reply it was only from the desire to be nice. Bewilderment had simply gone or at any rate was going fast. Finally she answered. "Will you give HIM up? Will you?"

"Ah leave her alone—leave her, leave her!" Sir Claude in sudden supplication murmured to Mrs. Beale.

Mrs. Wix at the same instant found another apostrophe. "Isn't it enough for you, madam, to have brought her to discussing your relations?"

Mrs. Beale left Sir Claude unheeded, but Mrs. Wix could make her flame. "My relations? What do you know, you hideous creature, about my relations, and what business on earth have you to speak of them? Leave the room this instant, you horrible old woman!"

"I think you had better go—you must really catch your boat," Sir Claude said distressfully to Mrs. Wix. He was out of it now, or wanted to be; he knew the worst and had accepted it: what now concerned him was to prevent, to dissipate vulgarities. "Won't you go—won't you just get off quickly?"

"With the child as quickly as you like. Not without her." Mrs. Wix was adamant.

"Then why did you lie to me, you fiend?" Mrs. Beale almost yelled. "Why did you tell me an hour ago that you had given her up?"

"Because I despaired of her—because I thought she had left me." Mrs. Wix turned to Maisie. "You were WITH them—in their connexion. But now your eyes are open, and I take you!"

"No you don't!" and Mrs. Beale made, with a great fierce jump, a wild snatch at her stepdaughter. She caught her by the arm and, completing an instinctive movement, whirled her round in a further leap to the door, which had been closed by Sir Claude the instant their voices had risen. She fell back against it and, even while denouncing and waving off Mrs. Wix, kept it closed in an incoherence of passion. "You don't take her, but you bundle yourself: she stays with her own people and she's rid of you! I never heard anything so monstrous!" Sir Claude had rescued Maisie and kept hold of her; he held her in front of him, resting his hands very lightly on her shoulders and facing the loud adversaries. Mrs. Beale's flush had dropped; she had turned pale with a splendid wrath. She kept protesting and dismissing Mrs. Wix; she glued her back to the door to prevent Maisie's flight; she drove out Mrs. Wix by the window or the chimney. "You're a nice one—'discussing relations'—with your talk of our 'connexion' and your insults! What in the world's our connexion but the love of the child who's our duty and our life and who holds us together as closely as she originally brought us?"

"I know, I know!" Maisie said with a burst of eagerness. "I did bring you."

The strangest of laughs escaped from Sir Claude. "You did bring us—you did!" His hands went up and down gently on her shoulders.

Mrs. Wix so dominated the situation that she had something sharp for every one. "There you have it, you see!" she pregnantly remarked to her pupil.

"WILL you give him up?" Maisie persisted to Mrs. Beale.

"To YOU, you abominable little horror?" that lady indignantly enquired, "and to this raving old demon who has filled your dreadful little mind with her wickedness? Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you did?"

"I love Sir Claude—I love HIM," Maisie replied with an awkward sense that she appeared to offer it as something that would do as well. Sir Claude had continued to pat her, and it was really an answer to his pats.

"She hates you—she hates you," he observed with the oddest quietness to Mrs. Beale.

His quietness made her blaze. "And you back her up in it and give me up to outrage?"

"No; I only insist that she's free—she's free."

Mrs. Beale stared—Mrs. Beale glared. "Free to starve with this pauper lunatic?"

"I'll do more for her than YOU ever did!" Mrs. Wix retorted. "I'll work my fingers to the bone."

Maisie, with Sir Claude's hands still on her shoulders, felt, just as she felt the fine surrender in them, that over her head he looked in a certain way at Mrs. Wix. "You needn't do that," she heard him say. "She has means."

"Means?—Maisie?" Mrs. Beale shrieked. "Means that her vile father has stolen!"

"I'll get them back—I'll get them back. I'll look into it." He smiled and nodded at Mrs. Wix.

This had a fearful effect on his other friend. "Haven't I looked into it, I should like to know, and haven't I found an abyss? It's too inconceivable—your cruelty to me!" she wildly broke out. She had hot tears in her eyes.

He spoke to her very kindly, almost coaxingly. "We'll look into it again; we'll look into it together. It IS an abyss, but he CAN be made—or Ida can. Think of the money they're getting now!" he laughed. "It's all right, it's all right," he continued. "It wouldn't do—it wouldn't do. We CAN'T work her in. It's perfectly true—she's unique. We're not good enough—oh no!" and, quite exuberantly, he laughed again.

"Not good enough, and that beast IS?" Mrs. Beale shouted.

At this for a moment there was a hush in the room, and in the midst of it Sir Claude replied to the question by moving with Maisie to Mrs. Wix. The next thing the child knew she was at that lady's side with an arm firmly grasped. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. "Let them pass," said Sir Claude at last.

She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other. Then she saw Mrs. Beale turn to her. "I'm your mother now, Maisie. And he's your father."

"That's just where it is!" sighed Mrs. Wix with an effect of irony positively detached and philosophic.

Mrs. Beale continued to address her young friend, and her effort to be reasonable and tender was in its way remarkable. "We're representative, you know, of Mr. Farange and his former wife. This person represents mere illiterate presumption. We take our stand on the law."

"Oh the law, the law!" Mrs. Wix superbly jeered. "You had better indeed let the law have a look at you!"

"Let them pass—let them pass!" Sir Claude pressed his friend hard—he pleaded.

But she fastened herself still to Maisie. "DO you hate me, dearest?"

Maisie looked at her with new eyes, but answered as she had answered before. "Will you give him up?"

Mrs. Beale's rejoinder hung fire, but when it came it was noble. "You shouldn't talk to me of such things!" She was shocked, she was scandalised to tears.

For Mrs. Wix, however, it was her discrimination that was indelicate. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she roundly cried.

Sir Claude made a supreme appeal. "Will you be so good as to allow these horrors to terminate?"

Mrs. Beale fixed her eyes on him, and again Maisie watched them. "You should do him justice," Mrs. Wix went on to Mrs. Beale. "We've always been devoted to him, Maisie and I—and he has shown how much he likes us. He would like to please her; he would like even, I think, to please me. But he hasn't given you up."

They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie's observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this particular moment. "Yes, my dear, I haven't given you up," Sir Claude said to Mrs. Beale at last, "and if you'd like me to treat our friends here as solemn witnesses I don't mind giving you my word for it that I never never will. There!" he dauntlessly exclaimed.

"He can't!" Mrs. Wix tragically commented.

Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face about. "He can't!" she literally mocked.

"He can't, he can't, he can't!"—Sir Claude's gay emphasis wonderfully carried it off.

Mrs. Beale took it all in, yet she held her ground; on which Maisie addressed Mrs. Wix. "Shan't we lose the boat?"

"Yes, we shall lose the boat," Mrs. Wix remarked to Sir Claude.

Mrs. Beale meanwhile faced full at Maisie. "I don't know what to make of you!" she launched.

"Good-bye," said Maisie to Sir Claude.

"Good-bye, Maisie," Sir Claude answered.

Mrs. Beale came away from the door. "Goodbye!" she hurled at Maisie; then passed straight across the room and disappeared in the adjoining one.

Sir Claude had reached the other door and opened it. Mrs. Wix was already out. On the threshold Maisie paused; she put out her hand to her stepfather. He took it and held it a moment, and their eyes met as the eyes of those who have done for each other what they can. "Good-bye," he repeated.

"Good-bye." And Maisie followed Mrs. Wix.

They caught the steamer, which was just putting off, and, hustled across the gulf, found themselves on the deck so breathless and so scared that they gave up half the voyage to letting their emotion sink. It sank slowly and imperfectly; but at last, in mid-channel, surrounded by the quiet sea, Mrs. Wix had courage to revert. "I didn't look back, did you?"

"Yes. He wasn't there," said Maisie.

"Not on the balcony?"

Maisie waited a moment; then "He wasn't there" she simply said again.

Mrs. Wix also was silent a while. "He went to HER," she finally observed.

"Oh I know!" the child replied.

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.

THE END