What Maisie Knew

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