Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/237

Rh address which, over the top of the hansom and poised on the step, he had given the driver. Reconstructing these things later, Maisie believed that she at this point would have put a question to him had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her—she could scarce know which—come from his suddenly making her feel his arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way he had never yet shown her. It seemed to her that he trembled, trembled too much to speak, and this had the effect of making her, with an emotion which, though it had begun to throb in an instant, was by no means all dread, conform to his portentous hush. The act of possession that his pressure in a manner advertised came back to her after the longest of the long intermissions that had ever let anything come back. They drove and drove, and he kept her close; she stared straight before her, holding her breath, watching one dark street succeed another, and strangely conscious that what it all meant was somehow that papa was less to be left out of everything than she had supposed. It took her but a minute to surrender to this discovery, which, in the form of his present