Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/149

Rh 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 she has bolted? They'll say it was my doing that made her bolt."

Maisie could grasp the force of this reasoning, but it offered no check to Mrs. Wix. "Why need you mind that—if you 've done it for so high a motive? Think of the beauty of it," the good lady pressed.

"Of bolting with you?" Sir Claude ejaculated.

She faintly smiled—she even faintly colored. "So far from doing you harm it will do you the highest good. Sir Claude, if you 'll listen to me, it will save you."

"Save me from what?"

Maisie, at this question, waited with renewed suspense for an answer that would bring the thing to a finer point than their companion had brought it to before. But there was, on the contrary, only more mystification in Mrs. Wix's reply. "Ah, from you know what!"

"Do you mean from some other woman?"

"Yes—from a real bad one."

Sir Claude, at least, the child could see, was not mystified; so little, indeed, that a