Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/394

380 white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome. Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs. Beale's isolation was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The perception of this dilemma was the germ, on the child's part, of a new question altogether. What if, with this indulgence—? But the idea lost itself in something too frightened for hope and too conjectured for fear; and while everything went by leaps and bounds one of the waiters stood at the door to remind them that the table d'hôte was half over.

"Had you come up to wash hands?" Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them. "Go and do it quickly, and I 'll be with you; they've put my boxes in that nice room—it was Sir Claude's. Trust him," she laughed, "to have a good one!" The door of a neighboring room stood open, and now, from the threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix, she sent a note flying that gave the very key of what, as she would have said, she was up to. "Dear lady, please attend to my daughter."

She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it represented—oh, for offices