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The visitor's grimace grew more marked as he continued to look, and

the conscious little

schoolroom felt still more like a cage at a

menagerie.

What she most particularly knew--and

the information came to her,

by the sound of the large social

current that carried them back to their life.

It was singular perhaps after this that Maisie never put a question

about Mr. Perriam, and it was

unsought, straight from Mrs. Wix--was that

Sir Claude wouldn't at all care for the visits of a millionaire who was in and out of the upper rooms.

The next minute they were on the

stairs, and Mrs. Wix and her companion, at the open door and looking

mutely at each other, were reached

still more singular that by the end of a

week she knew all she didn't ask.

As against Mrs. Beale, she more than once intimated, she had been willing to do

the best for her, but as against

Sir Claude she could do nothing for

her at all.

It was extraordinary the number of things that, still without a question, Maisie knew by the time her stepfather came back

from Paris--came bringing her a

splendid apparatus for painting in

water-colours and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would have been droll if it had not been a trifle disconcerting, a second and even a more elegant umbrella.

How little he would care was proved by

the fact that under the sense of them Mrs. Wix's discretion broke down

altogether; she was capable of

a transfer of allegiance, capable, at the

altar of propriety, of a desperate sacrifice of her ladyship.

He had forgotten all about the first,

with which, buried in as many

That gentleman became therefore a kind of

flourishing public secret, out of the

wrappers as a mummy of the Pharaohs, she

wouldn't for the world have done anything so profane as use it.

Maisie knew above all that though she was now, by what she called an informal

understanding, on Sir Claude's "side,"

Maisie could meet such pressure so far as meeting it was to be in a position to

reply, in words directly inspired,

of the revelation of Sir Claude's danger she

was told by Mrs. Wix, that her mother wanted more and more to know why

the devil her father didn't send for her: she had too long expected mamma's curiosity on this point to express itself sharply.

that papa would be hanged before he'd

again be saddled with her.

She therefore recognised the hour that in

troubled glimpses she had long foreseen, the hour when--the phrase for it came back to her from

Mrs. Beale--with two fathers, two mothers and

two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn't know "wherever" togo.

Such apprehension as she felt on this score was not diminished

by the fact that

Mrs. Wix herself was suddenly white with terror: a

circumstance leading Maisie to the further knowledge that this lady

was still more scared on her own behalf than on that of her pupil.

A governess who had only one frock was not likely to have either two

fathers or two mothers: accordingly if even with these resources Maisie

was to be in the streets,

where in the name of all that was dreadful

was poor Mrs. Wix to be?

It had come suddenly but completely,

this signal of which

and ended with the request that she would be

pleased on the spot to "bundle."

but Mrs. Wix was

better off than Maisie in having a plan of defence.

she would "leave" for the police perhaps, but she

wouldn't leave for mere outrage.

it was quite mature; but meanwhile, she hastened

to declare, her feet were firm in the schoolroom.

it had been one of many symptoms of a situation strained--"between them all,"

as Mrs. Wix said, "but especially between the two"--to the point of God

only knew what.

Then it was that, completely relaxed, demoralised as she

had never been,

in another instant were sobbing in each

other's arms.

It took her pupil but

a moment to feel that she quivered with insecurity, and, the contact

of her terror aiding, the pair

Sir Claude. "Me, ME!" the poor woman wailed,

"who've seen what I've seen and gone through everything only to cover

her up and ease her off and smooth her down?

Her great bitterness was that Ida had called her false, denounced her hypocrisy and duplicity, reviled her spying and tattling,

her lying and grovelling to

you must permit me to repeat, is that she'll

go off to get rid of us."

Maisie's own mother, that she's lower than a domestic; but my being betrayed into

such remarks is just a reason the more for our getting away.

"Don't say it--don't say it!" Mrs. Wix pleaded. "Don't speak of anything

so fatal. You know what I mean. We

Sir Claude laughed. "That would be the very

making of us!"

he had become more grave and he pensively wiped his moustache.

"Won't all the world say I'm awful if I

leave the house before--before

this reasoning, but it offered no check

to Mrs. Wix.

she has bolted? They'll say it was my

doing so that made her bolt."

It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie's contemplation

transferred itself: partly because,

On that day Mrs. Beale

had surpassed her in dignity,

though her heart was in her throat

for trepidation, her delicacy deterred her from appearing herself to

press the question; partly from the coercion of seeing Mrs. Wix come out

as Mrs. Wix had never come before--not even on the day of her call at

Mrs. Beale's with the news of mamma's marriage.

It gave her often an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if

she could only get at experience

by flattening her nose against a pane

of glass.

her nose while she

waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence.

So the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the

long habit, from the first, of seeing

herself in discussion and finding

in the fury of it--she had had a glimpse of the game of football--a sort

of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity.

and I give it to her before

you, that I'll never, never, forsake you.

While she was so engaged she became aware that his own breast was agitated, and

gathered from it with rapture

Maisie did take it in--took it with a long tremor of all her little

being; and then as, to emphasise it,

Mrs. Wix--Mrs. Wix was the only one

who made a noise.

he drew her closer she buried her

head on his shoulder and cried without sound and without pain.

There was as yet nevertheless no attempt to eject her by force, and she

recognised that Sir Claude, taking such a stand as never before, had

intervened with passion

spoke to her of the pecuniary sacrifice

by which she herself purchased the scant security she enjoyed and which,

if it was a defence against the hand of violence, yet left her exposed to incredible rudeness.

As Maisie remembered--and

remembered wholly without disdain--that he had told her he was afraid of

her ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was really prepared to do. Mrs. Wix

There was a quarter's salary owing her--a great name, even Maisie could suspect,

for a small matter; she should

never see it as long as she lived, but

keeping quiet about it put her ladyship, thank heaven, a little in one's power.

Maisie felt that if their maintenance

should hang by a thread they must

He had sent home for schoolroom

consumption a huge frosted cake, a wonderful delectable mountain with

geological strata of jam, which might,

with economy, see them through

many days of their siege; but it was none the less known to Mrs. Wix that his affairs were more and more involved, and her fellow partaker looked back tenderly, in the light of these involutions, at the expression of face with which he had greeted the proposal that he should

set up another establishment.

This was his direct way of rising to Mrs.

Wix's grand lesson--

fell asleep; they tried a hundred places

for the best one to have tea.

They rode on the top of 'buses; they visited outlying parks; they went

to cricket-matches where Maisie

that had kept one awake--when he took out his

stepdaughter with a fresh alacrity and they rambled the great town in

search, as Mrs. Wix called it, of combined amusement and instruction.

There was at this season a wonderful month of May--as soft as a

drop of the wind in a gale

of making his little accepted charge his duty and

his life.

at things that they agreed were too

small, and it was during these hours that Mrs. Wix, alone at home, but a subject of regretful reference as they pulled off their gloves for refreshment, subsequently described herself as least sheltered from the blows her ladyship had achieved such ingenuity in dealing.

There was by this time no pretence on the part of any one of denying it to be

fortunate that her ladyship habitually

She again and again repeated that she wouldn't so much have minded having her

"attainments" held up to scorn

left London every Saturday and

was more and more disposed to a return late in the week.

of a Sunday; and he also mentioned

how often she had declared to him that if he had a grain of spirit he would be ashamed to accept a menial position about Mr. Farange's daughter.

If there was a type Ida despised, Sir Claude communicated to Maisie, it

was the man who pottered about town

wife against the outrage of that person's

barefaced attempt to swindle her.

It was her ladyship's contention that he was in craven fear of his predecessor--otherwise he would recognise it as an obligation of

plain decency to protect his

her husband's attitude of staying behind to

look after a child for whom the most elaborate provision had been made.

independent grounds, that Ida's weekly

excursions were feelers for a more considerable absence.

The swindle was that Mr. Farange

put upon her the whole intolerable burden; "and even when I pay for you myself,"

would be sure to arrive when she wouldn't

come back at all.

beside him staring rather sightlessly at a

roomful of pictures which he had mystified her much by speaking of with

a bored sigh as a "silly superstition."

This might moreover have been taken to be the sense of a remark made by

her stepfather as--one rainy day when the streets were all splash and

two umbrellas unsociable and the wanderers had sought shelter in the

National Gallery--Maisie sat

Sir Claude promptly took her up. "What do I offer you, you naturally

enquire? My poor chick, that's just

what I ask myself. I don't see it,

I confess, quite as straight as Mrs. Wix."

Maisie, at this, emitted a low but lengthened sigh, a slight sound of

reluctant assent which would

seemed to signify that she too had no

alternative to suggest.

Mrs. Beale was at home, but not in the

drawing-room, and when the butler

and the effect of the whole hour was

to show the child how much, how quite formidably indeed, after all, she was loved.

that she really struck her as a new

acquaintance, somehow recalled more familiarity than Maisie could feel.

This was the more the case as her stepmother, so changed--in

the very manner of her mother--

a minute together before she felt

elated at the way she had met the choice imposed on her in the cab.

had always dimly made a distinction, not

applying that epithet without reserve to the other.

The child knew one of her father's wives

was a woman of fashion, but she

anybody who had once mended underclothing

and had meals in the nursery.