Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/199

Rh benefit as soon as look at you. Should you like her to know, my dear?" Maisie had a sense of her launching this inquiry at him with effect; yet our young lady was also conscious of hoping that Sir Claude would reply in the affirmative. We have already learned that she had come to like people's liking her to "know." Before he could reply at all, however, her mother opened a pair of arms of extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp. "My own child," Ida murmured in a voice—a voice of sudden confused tenderness—that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips that even in the old vociferous years had always been sharp. The next moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust into a jeweller's shopfront, but only to be as suddenly ejected with a push and the brisk injunction: "Now go to the Captain!"

Maisie glanced at the gentleman submissively, but felt the want of more introduction. "The Captain?"