Maisie advanced beside him, making out even across the interval that her ladyship was ill at ease. "Then what will she do?"
Sir Claude puffed his cigarette. "She's quickly thinking." He appeared to enjoy it.
Ida had wavered but an instant; her companion clearly gave her moral support. Maisie thought he somehow looked brave, and he had no likeness whatever to Mr. Perriam. His face, thin and rather sharp, was smooth, and it was not till they came nearer that she saw he had a remarkably fair little moustache. She could already see that his eyes were of the lightest blue. He was far nicer than Mr. Perriam. Mamma looked terrible from afar, but even under her guns the child's curiosity flickered and she appealed again to Sir Claude. "Is it—is it Lord Eric?"
Sir Claude smoked composedly enough. "I think it's the Count."
This was a happy solution—it fitted her idea of a count. But what idea, as she now came grandly on, did mamma fit?—unless that of an actress, in some tremendous situation, sweeping down to the footlights as if she would jump them. Maisie felt really so frightened that before she knew it she had passed her hand into Sir Claude's arm. Her pressure caused him to stop, and at the sight of this the other couple came equally to a stand and, beyond the diminished space, remained a moment more in talk. This, however, was the matter of an instant; leaving the Count apparently to come round more circuitously—an outflanking movement, if Maisie had but known—her ladyship resumed the onset. "What will she do now?" her daughter asked.
Sir Claude was at present in a position to say: "Try to pretend it's me."
"You?"
"Why that I'm up to something."
In another minute poor Ida had justified this prediction, erect there before them like a figure of justice in full dress. There were parts of her face that grew whiter while Maisie looked, and other parts in which this change seemed to make other colours reign with more intensity. "What are you doing with my daughter?" she demanded of her husband; in spite of the indignant tone of which Maisie had a greater sense than ever in her life before of not being personally noticed. It seemed to her Sir Claude also grew pale as an effect of the loud defiance with which Ida twice repeated this question. He put her, instead of answering it, an enquiry of his own: "Who the devil have you got hold of now?" and at this her ladyship turned tremendously to the child, glaring at her as at an equal plotter of sin. Maisie received in petrifaction the full force of her mother's huge painted eyes—they were like Japanese lanterns swung under festal arches. But life came back to her from a tone suddenly and strangely softened. "Go straight to that gentleman, my dear; I've asked him to take you a few minutes. He's charming—go. I've something to say to this creature."
Maisie felt Sir Claude immediately clutch her. "No, no—thank you: that won't do. She's mine."
"Yours?" It was confounding to Maisie to hear her speak quite as if she had never heard of Sir Claude before.
"Mine. You've given her up. You've not another word to say about her. I have her from her father," said Sir Claude—a statement that startled his companion, who could also measure its lively action on her mother.
There was visibly, however, an influence that made Ida consider; she glanced at the gentleman she had left, who, having strolled with his hands in his pockets to some distance, stood there with unembarrassed vagueness. She directed to him the face that was like an illuminated garden, turnstile and all, for the frequentation of which he had his season-ticket; then she looked again at Sir Claude. "I've given her up to her father to keep—not to get rid of by sending about the town either with you or with any one else. If she's not to mind me let him come and tell me so. I decline to take it from another person, and I like your pretending that with your humbug of 'interest' you've a leg to stand on. I know your game and have something now to say to you about it."
Sir Claude gave a squeeze of the child's arm. "Didn't I tell you she'd have, Miss Farange?"
"You're uncommonly afraid to hear it," Ida went on; "but if you think she'll protect you from it you're mightily mistaken." She gave him a moment. "I'll give her the benefit as soon as look at you. Should you like her to know, my dear?" Maisie had a sense of her launching the question with effect; yet our young lady was also conscious of hoping that Sir Claude would declare that preference. We have already learned that she had come to like people's liking her to "know." Before he could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp. "My own child," Ida murmured in a voice—a voice of sudden confused tenderness—that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of glass, into a jeweller's shop-front, but only
