Mrs. Wix, instead of directly answering, only blinked in support of her st.u.r.diness. "My dear, in what a tone you ask that! You're coming out."

"Why shouldn't I? YOU'VE come out. Mrs. Beale has come out. We each have our turn!" And Maisie threw off the most extraordinary little laugh that had ever pa.s.sed her young lips.

There pa.s.sed Mrs. Wix's indeed the next moment a sound that more than matched it. "You're most remarkable!" she neighed.

Her pupil, though wholly without aspirations to pertness, barely faltered. "I think you've done a great deal to make me so."

"Very true, I have." She dropped to humility, as if she recalled her so recent self-arraignment.

"Would you accept her then? That's what I ask," said Maisie.

"As a subst.i.tute?" Mrs. Wix turned it over; she met again the child's eyes. "She has literally almost fawned upon me."

"She hasn't fawned upon HIM. She hasn't even been kind to him."

Mrs. Wix looked as if she had now an advantage. "Then do you propose to 'kill' her?"

"You don't answer my question," Maisie persisted. "I want to know if you accept her."

Mrs. Wix continued to hedge. "I want to know if YOU do!"

Everything in the child's person, at this, announced that it was easy to know. "Not for a moment."

"Not the two now?" Mrs. Wix had caught on; she flushed with it. "Only him alone?"

"Him alone or n.o.body."

"Not even ME?" cried Mrs. Wix.

Maisie looked at her a moment, then began to undress. "Oh you're n.o.body!"

XXIX

Her sleep was drawn out, she instantly recognised lateness in the way her eyes opened to Mrs. Wix, erect, completely dressed, more dressed than ever, and gazing at her from the centre of the room. The next thing she was sitting straight up, wide awake with the fear of the hours of "abroad" that she might have lost. Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"

"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.

"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked stiffly backward. "He's there."

"And you've seen him?"

"No. He's there--he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each other.

"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had used was a flash of diplomacy--to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal, strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have been a.s.sociated with her att.i.tude toward what had happened. For Maisie herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.

Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had together a _cafe complet_ in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there--he's there!" she had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently being found in the salon.

"He's there--he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."

"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.

"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she reiterated.

"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.

She waited an instant. "G.o.d knows!"

Maisie wondered a little why, or how, G.o.d should know; this, however, delayed but an instant her bringing out: "Well, won't she go back?"

"Go back? Never!"

"She'll stay all the same?"

"All the more."

"Then won't Sir Claude go?" Maisie asked.

"Go back--if SHE doesn't?" Mrs. Wix appeared to give this question the benefit of a minute's thought. "Why should he have come--only to go back?"

Maisie produced an ingenious solution. "To MAKE her go. To take her."

Mrs. Wix met it without a concession. "If he can make her go so easily, why should he have let her come?"

Maisie considered. "Oh just to see ME. She has a right."

"Yes--she has a right."

"She's my mother!" Maisie tentatively t.i.ttered.

"Yes--she's your mother."

"Besides," Maisie went on, "he didn't let her come. He doesn't like her coming, and if he doesn't like it--"

Mrs. Wix took her up. "He must lump it--that's what he must do! Your mother was right about him--I mean your real one. He has no strength.

No--none at all." She seemed more profoundly to muse. "He might have had some even with HER--I mean with her ladyship. He's just a poor sunk slave," she a.s.serted with sudden energy.

Maisie wondered again. "A slave?"

"To his pa.s.sions."

She continued to wonder and even to be impressed; after which she went on: "But how do you know he'll stay?"

"Because he likes us!"--and Mrs. Wix, with her emphasis of the word, whirled her charge round again to deal with posterior hooks. She had positively never shaken her so.

It was as if she quite shook something out of her. "But how will that help him if we--in spite of his liking!--don't stay?"