Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/391

Rh tact. " They scarce had time to wonder what this was before it was, as they might have said right there. "He's as free as I am!"

"Yes, I know," said Maisie; as if, however, independently weighing the value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of her stepmother's treating it as news to her, who had been the first person, literally, to whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a few seconds, as if with the sound of it in her ears, she stood with him again, in memory and in the twilight, in the hotel garden at Folkestone.

Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the effect of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that showed even when she dropped—still quite impartially—almost to the confidential. "Well, then we 've only to wait. He can't do without us long. I 'm sure, Mrs. Wix, he can't do without you! He's devoted to you; he has told me so much about you. The extent I count on you, you know, count on you to help me!"—was an extent that even all her radiance could n't express. What it couldn't express, quite as much as what it could, made at any rate, every instant, her presence, and even her famous