Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/267

Rh "Stepmothers don't pay!" cried the Countess. "No stepmother ever paid in her life!" The next moment they were in the street together, and the next the child was in the cab, with the Countess on the pavement, but close to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out of a pocket. Her father had vanished, and there was even yet nothing in that to reawaken the pang of loss. "Here 's money," said the brown lady: "go!" The sound was commanding; the cab rattled off; Maisie sat there with her hand full of coin. All that for a cab?—as they passed a street-lamp she bent to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of sovereigns. There must, then, have been great interests in America. It was still, at any rate, the Arabian Nights.

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money was far too much even for a fee in a fairy-tale, and in the absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the hour was now late, had not yet returned to the Regent's Park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as loud as Maisie was low and as bold as she was bland,