Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/438

424 almost simultaneously with that impression she found herself answering: "Yes—if you have seen her."

He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just now I 've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"

There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she inquired in a moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"

He received her inquiry as he had received her doubt—with an extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine, of course, why you think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."

She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back-garden at her mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing—high, high, high—that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook. "Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"