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 là." 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 êtes 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
