Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/51

Rh strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had made use of the words, "you dear old duck"—an expression which, by its oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now always mentally characterized as the pretty one. She wondered whether this affection would be as great as before; that would at all events be the case with the prettiness. Maisie could see it in the face which showed brightly at the window of the brougham.

The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine conditions papa this time would offer. He had usually come for her in a hansom with a four-wheeler behind for the boxes. The four-wheeler with the boxes on it was actually there; but mamma was the only lady with whom she had ever been in a conveyance of the kind always, of old, spoken of by Moddle as a private carriage. Papa's carriage was, now that he had one, still more private somehow than mamma's; and when at last she found herself quite on top, as she felt, of its inmates and gloriously rolling away she put to Miss Overmore, after another immense and more talkative