Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/280

266 save lots of money—they could let their eyes hover tenderly on the far-off white cliffs that so often had signalled to the embarrassed English a promise of safety. Maisie stared at them as if she might really make out after a little a queer, dear figure perched on them—a figure as to which she had already the subtle sense that, wherever perched, it would be the very oddest yet seen in France. But it was at least as exciting to feel where Mrs. Wix was n't as it would have been to know where she was; and if she wasn't yet at Boulogne, this only thickened the plot.

If she was not to be seen that day, however, the evening was marked by an apparition before which, none the less, the savor of suspense folded, on the spot, its wings. Adjusting her respirations and attaching, under dropped lashes, all her thoughts to a smartness of frock and frill for which she could reflect that she had not appealed in vain to a loyalty, in Susan Ash, triumphant over the nice things their feverish flight had left behind, Maisie spent on the bench in the garden of the hotel the half-hour before dinner, that mysterious ceremony of the table d'hôte for which she had prepared with a