Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/381

Rh a difference, might diminish the crime, for Mrs. Beale; till such a reflection was in its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wix's face of the collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner that, after all her pains, her pupil did n't even yet adequately understand. Never so much as when just so confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her thought for a minute centred in the effort to come out with something which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "Just trust me, dear: that 's all!"—she came out finally with that; and it was perhaps a good sign of her action that, with a long, impartial moan, Mrs. Wix floated her to bed.

There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude—which Mrs. Wix let out that she deemed the worst of omens; yet it was just for the quieter communion they so got from him that when, after the coffee and rolls which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh drafts upon his credit, they wandered again up the hill to the rampart instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded Virgin;