Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/134

120 mutely at each other, were reached by the sound of the ample 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 still more singular that by the end of a week she knew all she did n't ask. What she most particularly knew—and the information came to her, unsought, straight from Mrs. Wix—was that Sir Claude would n't at all care for the visits of a millionnaire who was in and out of the upper rooms. 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. 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-colors and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would have been droll if it had not been a trifle