Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/274

260 and pale copy of the picture it presented to his young friend. Abruptly, that morning, he had yielded to the action of the idea pumped into him for weeks by Mrs. Wix on lines of approach that she had been capable of the extraordinary art of preserving from entanglement with the fine network of his relations with Mrs. Beale. The breath of her sincerity, blowing without a break, had puffed him up to the flight by which, in the degree I have indicated, Maisie too was carried off her feet. This consisted in neither more nor less than the brave stroke of his getting off from Mrs. Beale as well as from his wife—of making with the child straight for some such foreign land as would give a support to Mrs. Wix's dream that she might still see his errors renounced and his delinquencies redeemed. What other reparation could have the beauty of his devoting himself, under eyes that would miss no faintest shade of the sacrifice, to the relief and rescue, to what even the strange frequenters of her ladyship's earlier period used to call the real good, of the little unfortunate? Maisie' s head held a suspicion of all that, during the last long interval, had confusedly, but quite candidly, come and gone in his own; a