Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/68

54 in the hall, seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted Beale Farange's door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers were concocted with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last limits of the squeeze; but she now felt those limits to be transcended and that the duration of her visitor's hug was a direct reply to Miss Overmore's act of abolition. She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be possible—that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under protection of the fact that papa, always tormented, in spite of her arguments, with the idea of a school, had for a three days' excursion to Brighton absolutely insisted on the attendance of her adversary. It was true that when Maisie explained their absence and their important motive Mrs. Wix wore an expression so peculiar that it could only have had its origin in surprise. This contradiction, however, peeped out only to vanish, for at the very moment that, in the spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon her young friend a hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the door and Miss Overmore