Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/90

76 "We won't talk about it now; you've months and months to put in first." And Sir Claude drew her closer.

"Oh, that's what makes it so hard to give her up!" Mrs. Beale sighed, holding out her arms to her stepdaughter. Maisie, quitting Sir Claude, went over to them, and, clasped in a still tenderer embrace, felt entrancingly the expansion of the field of happiness. "I'll come for you," said her stepmother, "if Sir Claude keeps you too long; we must make him quite understand that! Don't talk to me about her ladyship!" she went on, to their visitor, so familiarly that it was almost as if they must have met before. "I know her ladyship as if I had made her. They're a pretty pair of parents!" Mrs. Beale exclaimed.

Maisie had so often heard them called so that the remark diverted her but an instant from the agreeable wonder of this grand new form of allusion to her mother; and that, in its turn, presently left her free to catch at the pleasant possibility, in connection with herself, of a relation much happier, as between Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude than as between mamma and papa. Still the next thing that happened was that her interest