Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/208

194 come to was that, on the subject of her ladyship, it was the first real kindness she had heard, so that at the touch of it something strange and deep and pitying surged up within her—a revelation that, practically and so far as she knew, her mother, apart from this, had only been disliked. Mrs. Wix's original account of Sir Claude's affection seemed as empty now as the chorus in a children's game, and the husband and wife, but a little way off at that moment, were face to face in hatred and with the dreadful name he had called her still in the air. What was it the Captain on the other hand had called her?—Maisie wanted to hear that again. The tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, which burned under them with the rush of a consciousness that for her too, five minutes before, the vivid, towering beauty whose onset she awaited had been for the moment an object of pure dread. She became indifferent on the spot to her usual fear of showing what in children was notoriously most offensive—she presented to her companion, soundlessly but hideously, her wet, distorted face. She cried, with a pang, straight at him, cried as she felt that she had never cried at any one in all her life. "Oh, do you love her?" she brought out with a gulp