Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/61

Rh own. The ladies, on the other hand, addressed her as "You poor pet" and scarcely touched her even to kiss her; but it was of the ladies she was most afraid.

She was old enough now to understand how disproportionate a stay she had already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into the ambiguity that surrounded this circumstance and that oppressed her particularly whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess. "Oh, you need n't worry; she does n't care!" Miss Overmore had often said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little you to think about, and she has gone abroad with them, and you needn't be in the least afraid that she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs. Farange had gone abroad, for she had had, many weeks before, a letter from her, that began "My precious pet" and that took leave for an indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever care so much about