Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/185

Rh certainly our idea." Of this idea Maisie naturally had less of a grasp, but it inspired her with almost equal enthusiasm. If in so bright a prospect there would be nothing to long for, it followed that she would n't long for Mrs. Wix; but her consciousness of her assent to the absence of that fond figure caused a pair of words that had often sounded in her ears to ring in them again. It showed her in short what her father had always meant by calling her mother a "low sneak" and her mother by calling her father one. She wondered if she herself should n't be a low sneak in learning to be so happy without Mrs. Wix. What would Mrs. Wix do? where would Mrs. Wix go? Before Maisie knew it, and at the door, as Sir Claude was off, these anxieties, on her lips, grew articulate and her stepfather had stopped long enough to answer them. "Oh, I 'll square her!" he said; and with this he departed.

Face to face with Mrs. Beale she gave a sigh of relief, looking round at what seemed to her the dawn of a higher order. "Then every one will be squared!" she peacefully said. On which her stepmother affectionately bent over her again.