"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
