Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/288

274 appeared to meet this appeal by saying with detachment enough: "You go back there to-night?"

"Oh, yes—there are plenty of trains." Again Sir Claude hesitated; it would have been hard to say if the child between them more connected or divided them. Then he brought out quietly: "It will be late for you to knock about. I 'll see you over."

"You need n't trouble, thank you. I think you won't deny that I can help myself and that it is n't the first time in my dreadful life that I 've somehow managed it." Save for this allusion to her dreadful life they talked there, Maisie noted, as if they were only rather superficial friends; a special effect that she had often wondered at before in the midst of what she supposed to be intimacies. This effect was augmented by the almost casual manner in which her ladyship went on: "I dare say I shall go abroad."

"From Dover, do you mean, straight?"

"How straight I can't say. I'm excessively ill." This, for a minute, struck Maisie as but a part of the conversation; at the end of which time she became aware that it ought to strike her—as it apparently didn't strike Sir Claude—as a part of something graver.