Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/148

134 will come to an impossible pass. You don't know what I went through with her for you yesterday—and for our poor darling; but it's not a thing I can promise you often to face again. She has dismissed me in horrible language—she has instructed the servants not to wait on me."

"Oh, the poor servants are all right!" Sir Claude eagerly cried.

"They 're certainly better than their mistress! It 's too dreadful that I should sit here and say of your wife, Sir Claude, and of 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. I shall stay till I 'm taken by the shoulders, but that may happen any day. What also may perfectly happen, you must permit me to repeat, is that she 'll go off to get rid of us."

"Oh, if she 'll only do that!" Sir Claude laughed. "That would be the very making of us!"

"Don't say it—don't say it!" Mrs. Wix pleaded. "Don't speak of anything so fatal! You know what I mean. We must all cling to the right. You must n't be bad."

Sir Claude set down his teacup; he had