Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/382

368 they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became definite about their friend's silence. "He is afraid of her! She has forbidden him to write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results. The first was her wondering, in dumb remonstrance, how Mrs. Wix, with a devotion not, after all, inferior to her own, could put into such an allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid, as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by that law she had had her due measure of latent apprehension of Mrs. Beale. What occurred at present, however, was that, whereas this sympathy appeared vain as for him, the ground of it loomed dimly as a reason for selfish alarm. That uneasiness had not carried her far before Mrs. Wix spoke again, and with an abruptness so great as almost to seem irrelevant. "Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her?"

It never had, in the least; yet the words