Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/353

Rh insisted on the items of her debt. "I have nothing of my own, I know—no money, no clothes, no appearance, no anything; nothing but my hold of this one little truth which is all in the world I can bribe you with—that the pair of you are more to me than all besides, and that if you 'll let me help you and save you, make what you both want possible in the one way it can be, why, I 'll work myself to the bone in your service!"

Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent appeal; he plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation and pain. He addressed himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters, until he met renewedly, as he so frequently and actively met it, the more than filial gaze of his intelligent little charge. That gave him—poor plastic and dependent male—his issue. If she was still a child, she was yet of the sex that could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed invitation to an embrace; she freshly sprang to him, and again they inaudibly conversed. "Be nice to her, be nice to her," he at last distinctly articulated—"be nice to her as you 've not even been to me!" On which, without another look at Mrs. Wix, he somehow got