Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/471

Rh me. I'm going, but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"

Maisie surveyed, for the idea of a particular loss, the immensity of space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost everything."

Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you have lost what we found together, with so much difficulty, two days ago?" As her pupil failed of response, she continued: "Do you mean to say you 've already forgotten what we found together?"

Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"

"Your moral sense. Haven't I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her hand.

It brought back to the child a recollection of how sometimes she could n't repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she thought with conscious stupidity of the mystery on which she was now pulled up. Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have plucked and now, with such a peremptory