Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/303

Rh put words into my mouth!" This was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction: Maisie could only feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their communication had abruptly ceased. That came out as Ida went on: "What business have you to speak to me of him?"

Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."

"Him—the biggest cad in London?" Her ladyship towered again, and in the gathered dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.

Maisie' s own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he was, and it made me like him. He said things—they were beautiful; they were, they were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home; for even in the midst of her surge of passion—of which, in fact, it was a part—there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious, of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which