Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/229

Rh exultantly responded. "He says he does n't want you mixed up."

"Mixed up with what?"

"That 's exactly what I want to know: mixed up with what, and how you are any more mixed?—" But Mrs. Beale paused without ending her question. She ended after an instant in a different way. "All you can say is it 's his fancy."

The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the fruit of weariness, that dismissed the subject, conveyed so vividly how much such a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own that our young lady was led by the mere fact of contact to arrive at a dim apprehension of the unuttered and the unknown. The relation between her step-parents had then a kind of mysterious residuum: this was the first time she really had reflected that except as regards herself it was not a relationship. To each other it was only what they might happen to make it, and she gathered that this, in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away from her. Did n't he fear she would be compromised? The perception of such a scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her that she might simplify everything by showing