Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/389

Rh remained unaware that this momentary pang was a foretaste of the experience of death. It passed in a flash, of course, with Mrs. Beale's brightness and with her own instant appeal. "You 've come alone?"

"Without Sir Claude?" Strangely, Mrs. Beale looked even brighter. "Yes; in the eagerness to get at you. You abominable little villain!"—and her stepmother, laughing clear, administered to her cheek a pat that was partly a pinch. "What were you up to and what did you take me for? But I 'm glad to be abroad, and, after all, it 's you who have shown me the way. I might n't, without you, have been able to come; that is, so soon. Well, here I am, at any rate, and in a moment more I should have begun to worry about you. This will do very well"—she was good-natured about the place and presently added that it was nice and Frenchy. But with a rosier glow she made again her great point: "I 'm free, I 'm free!" Maisie made, on her side, her own: she carried back her gaze to Mrs. Wix, whom amazement continued to hold; she drew, afresh, her old friend's attention to the superior way she did n't take that up. What she did take up, the next minute, was the