Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/213

Rh "My dear child—!" The Captain wanted words.

"Then don't do it only for just a little."

"A little?"

"Like all the others."

"Like all the others?"—he stood staring. She pulled away her hand. "Do it always!" Then she bounded to meet Sir Claude and as she left the Captain she heard him sound out with apparent gayety: "Oh, I 'll keep it up!" As she joined Sir Claude she perceived her mother, in the distance, move slowly off; and, glancing again at the Captain, saw him, swinging his stick, retreat in the same direction.

She had never seen Sir Claude look as he looked just then; flushed, yet not excited—settled rather in an immovable disgust and at once very sick and very hard. His conversation with her mother had clearly drawn blood, and the child's old horror came back to her, producing the instant moral contraction of the days when her parents had looked to her to feed their love of battle. Her greatest fear for the moment, however, was that her friend would see she had been crying. The next she became aware that he glanced at her and it presently occurred to her that