Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/233

Rh through a blur in which they became more magnificent, yet oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this required—a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir Claude—she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and pain into a single sharp little cry.

"Of all the wickedness—Beale!"

He had already, without distinguishing them in the mass of strollers, turned another way—it seemed at the brown lady's suggestion. Her course was marked, over heads and shoulders, by an upright scarlet plume, as to the ownership of which Maisie was instantly eager. "Who is she?—who is she?"

But Mrs. Beale, for a moment, only looked after them. "The liar—the liar!"

Maisie considered. "Because he's not—where one thought!" That was also, a month ago in Kensington Gardens, where her mother had not been. "Perhaps he has come back," she insinuated.