Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/317

Rh "Mrs. Wix. I 've had a wirem," he went on. "She has seen your mother."

"Seen mamma?" Maisie stared. "Where in the world?"

"Apparently in London. They 've been together."

For an instant this looked ominous—a fear came into her eyes. "Then she has n't gone?"

"Your mother?—to South Africa? I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude said; and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood there and with a kind of absent gaze—absent, that is, from her affairs—followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. "But I dare say it 's all right. She would n't come if it was n't—poor old thing: she knows rather well what she 's about."

This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it fit into her dream. "Well, what is she about?"

He stopped looking, at last, at the fishwife; he met his companion's inquiry. "Oh, you know!" There was something in the way he said it that made between them more of