Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/190

176 dear, the lectures at the institutions—at least at some of them—were directly addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none. This reason, Sir Claude said, was that she happened to be just going to be, though indeed they had nothing to do with that in now directing their steps to the banks of the Serpentine. Maisie's own park, in the north, had been nearer at hand; but they rolled westward in a hansom because at the end of the sweet June days that was the direction taken by every one any one looked at. They cultivated for an hour, on the Row and by the Drive, this opportunity for each observer to amuse and for one of them indeed not a little hilariously to mystify the other, and before the hour was over Maisie had elicited in reply to her sharpest challenge a further account of her friend's long absence.

"Why I 've broken my word to you so dreadfully—promising so solemnly and then never coming? Well, my dear, that's a question that, not seeing me day after day, you must very often have put to Mrs. Beale."

"Oh, yes," the child replied; "again and again."