Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/447

Rh So I do, old girl—I put it to you. Can you choose freely?"

This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see, intensely, its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice?'"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I 'll call it whatever you call it. I won't funk it—I have n't, have I? I 'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it is base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well—to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"

"Back to London."