Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/291

Rh, instead of breathing any such guess she let Sir Claude reply; all the more that his reply could contribute so much to her own present grandeur. "She won't be alone when she has a maid in attendance."

Maisie had never before had so much of a retinue and she waited also to enjoy the effect of it on her ladyship. "You mean the woman you brought from town?" Ida considered. "The person at the house spoke of her in a way that scarcely made her out company for my child." She spoke as if her child had never wanted, in her hands, for prodigious company. But she as distinctly continued to decline Sir Claude's. "Don't be an old goose," she said charmingly. "Let us alone."

Before them, on the grass, he looked graver than Maisie at all now thought the occasion warranted. "I don't see why you can't say it before me."

His wife smoothed one of her daughter's curls. "Say what, dear?"

"Why, what you came to say."

At this Maisie at last interposed; she appealed to Sir Claude. "Do let her say it to me."

He looked hard for a moment at his little