Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/217

Rh her stepmother had some subtle secret for not being bereft of him. That produced eventually a strange, a deeper communion with Mrs. Beale, the first sign of which had been—not on Maisie's part—a wonderful outbreak of tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying creature; she had not cried, to Maisie's knowledge, since the lowly governess days, the gray dawn of their connection. But she wept now with passion, professing loudly that it did her good and saying remarkable things to the child, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an addition to all the fine reasons stored up for not making anything worse. It had n't somehow made anything worse, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs. Beale what she had not told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest strain, to her sense, was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude's wife, and his wife was just what Mrs. Beale was unfortunately not. He sent his stepdaughter three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens a message as frank as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale had had to bring out in a manner that seemed half an appeal, half a defiance: "Well, yes, hang it—I do see him!"

How and when and where, however, were