Maisie could feel again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying "Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a question that at the worst was abrupt.
"Who is it this time, do you know?"
Mrs. Wix tried blind dignity. "Who is what, Sir Claude?"
"The man who stands the cabs. Who was in the one that waited at your door?"
At this challenge she faltered so long that her young friend's pitying conscience gave her a hand. "It wasn't the Captain."
This good intention, however, only converted the excellent woman's scruple to a more ambiguous stare; besides of course making Sir Claude go off. Mrs. Wix fairly appealed to him. "Must I really tell you?"
His amusement continued. "Did she make you promise not to?"
Mrs. Wix looked at him still harder. "I mean before Maisie."
Sir Claude laughed again. "Why she can't hurt him!"
Maisie felt herself, as it passed, brushed by the light humour of this. "Yes, I can't hurt him."
The straighteners again roofed her over; after which they seemed to crack with the explosion of their wearer's honesty. Amid the flying splinters Mrs. Wix produced a name. "Mr. Tischbein."
There was for an instant a silence that, under Sir Claude's influence and while he and Maisie looked at each other, suddenly pretended to be that of gravity. "We don't know Mr. Tischbein, do we, dear?"
Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "No, I can't place Mr. Tischbein."
It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "You must pardon me, Sir Claude," she said with an austerity of which the note was real, "if I thank God to your face that he has in his mercy—I mean his mercy to our charge—allowed me to achieve this act." She gave out a long puff of pain. "It was time!" Then as if still more to point the moral: "I said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I stand to it: I did both of those things when I saw how even she, poor thing, saw. If you want the dots on the i's you shall have them. What she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I'm just"—she quavered it out—"well, just clean! What she saw for her daughter was that there must at last be a decent person!"
Maisie was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not; the next instant, however, she more profoundly guessed against whom the discrimination was made. She was therefore left the more surprised at the complete candour with which he embraced the worst. "If she's bent on decent persons why has she given her to me? You don't call me a decent person, and I'll do Ida the justice that she never did. I think I'm as indecent as any one and that there's nothing in my behaviour that makes my wife's surrender a bit less ignoble!"
"Don't speak of your behaviour!" Mrs. Wix cried. "Don't say such horrible things; they're false and they're wicked and I forbid you! It's to keep you decent that I'm here and that I've done everything I have done. It's to save you—I won't say from yourself, because in yourself you're beautiful and good! It's to save you from the worst person of all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her! That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as even me; and if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may make room for Mrs. Beale!"
Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look, as Susan Ash would have said, queer; and it was perhaps a part of the queerness that he intensely smiled. "You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She has great merits of her own."
Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things, glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a "thank-you" in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the other side of the brim; so that, united by their grasp of this object, they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time Mrs. Wix had turned round. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that you are going back?"
"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something that touched her in the embarrassed, almost humiliated way their companion's challenge made him turn
