Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/334

320 outbreak, and the most she saw in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look, as Susan Ash would have said, queer, and it was perhaps a part of the queerness that he intensely smiled. "You 're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She has great merits of her own."

Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie' s sense, a hush that resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things, glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with the gleam of a "Thank you" in his face, but as he did so something moved her still to hold the other side of the brim; so that united by their grasp of this object they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time Mrs. Wix had fronted them. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that you are going back?"

"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something that touched her in the embarrassed, almost humiliated