Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/127

Rh of her ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the arms of a parent who had fought for her tooth and nail.

This was the very moral of a scene that flashed into vividness one day when the four happened to meet, without company, in the drawing-room, and Maisie found herself clutched to her mother's breast and passionately sobbed and shrieked over, made the subject of a demonstration that evidently formed the sequel to a sharp passage enacted just before. The connection required that, while she almost cradled the child in her arms, Ida should speak of her as hideously, as fatally estranged, and should rail at Sir Claude as the cruel author of the outrage. "He has taken you from me," she cried; "he has set you against me, and you 've been won away, and your horrid little mind has been poisoned! You 've gone over to him, you 've given yourself up, to side against me and hate me. You never open your mouth to me—you know you don't; and you chatter to him like a dozen magpies. Don't lie about it—I hear you all over the place. You hang about him