Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/270

256 "gime," such a "shime" as one had never had to put up with; a third treated with some vigor the question of the enormous sums due below stairs, in every department, for gratuitous labor and wasted zeal. Our young lady's consciousness was indeed mainly filled for several days with the apprehension created by the too slow subsidence of her attendant's sense of wrong. These days would be exciting indeed if an outbreak in the kitchen should crown them; and, to promote that prospect, she had more than one glimpse, through Susan's eyes, of forces making for an earthquake. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to the inflammables and already causing them to crackle was the circumstance of one's being called a horrid low thief for refusing to part with one's own.

The redeeming point of this tension was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to have had to do with a breathless perception in our heroine's breast that, scarcely more as the centre of Sir Claude's than as that of Susan's energies, she had soon after breakfast been conveyed from London to Folkestone and established at a lovely hotel. These agents, before her wondering eyes, had