Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/359

Rh a new suspicion of it. Mrs. Wix had never yet had a suspicion—that was certain—so calculated to throw her pupil, in spite of the closer union of these adventurous hours, upon the deep defensive. Her pupil made out indeed as many marvels as she had made out on the rush to Folkestone; and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs. Wix was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wix's, in the actual crisis, Sir Claude was—and most of all through long pauses—the perpetual, the insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his marriage and to the place he held in the schoolroom in those months of love and pain; only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the large consciousness he then filled out.

They went through it all again, and indeed while the interval lingered with the very weight of its charm they went, in spite of defences and suspicions, through everything. Their intensified clutch of the future throbbed like a clock ticking seconds; but this was a timepiece that inevitably as well—at the best—rang occasionally a portentous hour. Oh, there were several of these, and two or three of the worst on the old