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290 Maisie fully saw—saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I 've thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him—with him—" Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.

But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror—?"

"That it was he who's at Dover; that it was he who 's to take you. I mean to South Africa," Maisie said with another drop.

Ida's stupefaction, on this, kept her silent unnaturally long; so long that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but perfectly measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality. She loomed there in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb; her wrath was clearly still, as it had always been, a thing of resource and variety. What Maisie least expected of it was, by this law, what now occurred: it melted, in the summer twilight, gradually into pity, and the pity, after a little, found a cadence to which the renewed click of her purse gave an accent. She had put back what she had taken out. "You 're a dreadful, dismal, deplorable little thing!" she murmured; and with this she turned her back and rustled away over the lawn.