Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/354

340 out of the room; leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of these words as well as of the idea that he had, unmistakably, once more dodged.

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single thing he had thus prophesied came so true that it was after all no more than fair to expect quite as much for what he had as good as promised. His pledges they could verify to the letter, down to his very guarantee that a way would be found with Miss Ash. Roused in the summer dawn and vehemently squeezed by that interesting exile, Maisie fell back upon her couch with a renewed appreciation of his policy; a memento of which, when she rose, later on, to dress, glittered at her from the carpet in the shape of a sixpence that had overflowed from Susan's pride of possession. Sixpences really, for the forty-eight hours that followed, seemed to abound in her life; she fancifully computed the number of them represented by such a period of "larks." The number was not kept down, she presently noticed, by any scheme of revenge for