Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/139

Rh high interest." She had more than once remarked that his affairs were sadly involved, but that they must get him—Maisie and she together apparently—into Parliament. The child took it from her with a flutter of importance that Parliament was his natural sphere, and she was the less prepared to recognize a hindrance as she had never heard of any affairs whatever that were not involved. She had, in the old days, once been told by Mrs. Beale that her very own were, and, with the refreshment of knowing that she had affairs, the information had n't in the least overwhelmed her. It was true, and perhaps a little alarming, that she had never heard of any such matters since then. Full of charm, at any rate, was the prospect of some day getting Sir Claude in; especially after Mrs. Wix, as the fruit of more midnight colloquies, once went so far as to observe that she really believed it was all that was wanted to save him. Mrs. Wix, with these words, struck her pupil as cropping up, after the manner of mamma when mamma talked, quite in a new place; and the child stared as at the jump of a kangaroo.

"Save him from what?"

Mrs. Wix hesitated; then she covered a