Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/238

224, suggested a fresh kind of importance in him and with that a confused confidence. She neither knew exactly what he had done nor what he was doing; she could only be rather impressed and a little proud, vibrate with the sense that he had jumped up to do something and that she had as quickly become a part of it. It was a part of it too that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh white front of which the street-lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes. The child had been in thousands of stories—all Mrs. Wix's and her own, to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise—but she had never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian Nights had quite closed round her.

From this minute they were in everything, particularly in such an instant "open sesame" and in the departure of a cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents; they were, with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little brass knob on the wall, in a place that, at the top of