"And another b.u.t.tered roll?"

"Yes, please."

He signed to the hovering waiter, who arrived with the shining spout of plenty in either hand and with the friendliest interest in mademoiselle.

_"Les tartines sont la."_ Their cups were replenished and, while he watched almost musingly the bubbles in the fragrant mixture, "Just so--just so," Sir Claude said again and again. "It's awfully awkward!"

he exclaimed when the waiter had gone.

"That she won't go?"

"Well--everything! Well, well, well!" But he pulled himself together; he began again to eat. "I came back to ask you something. That's what I came back for."

"I know what you want to ask me," Maisie said.

"Are you very sure?"

"I'm ALMOST very."

"Well then risk it. You mustn't make ME risk everything."

She was struck with the force of this. "You want to know if I should be happy with THEM."

"With those two ladies only? No, no, old man: _vous n'y etes pas_. So now--there!" Sir Claude laughed.

"Well then what is it?"

The next minute, instead of telling her what it was, he laid his hand across the table on her own and held her as if under the prompting of a thought. "Mrs. Wix would stay with HER?"

"Without you? Oh yes--now."

"On account, as you just intimated, of Mrs. Beale's changed manner?"

Maisie, with her sense of responsibility, weighed both Mrs. Beale's changed manner and Mrs. Wix's human weakness. "I think she talked her round."

Sir Claude thought a moment. "Ah poor dear!"

"Do you mean Mrs. Beale?"

"Oh no--Mrs. Wix."

"She likes being talked round--treated like any one else. Oh she likes great politeness," Maisie expatiated. "It affects her very much."

Sir Claude, to her surprise, demurred a little to this. "Very much--up to a certain point."

"Oh up to any point!" Maisie returned with emphasis.

"Well, haven't I been polite to her?"

"Lovely--and she perfectly worships you."

"Then, my dear child, why can't she let me alone?"--this time Sir Claude unmistakeably blushed. Before Maisie, however, could answer his question, which would indeed have taken her long, he went on in another tone: "Mrs. Beale thinks she has probably quite broken her down. But she hasn't."

Though he spoke as if he were sure, Maisie was strong in the impression she had just uttered and that she now again produced. "She has talked her round."

"Ah yes; round to herself, but not round to me."

Oh she couldn't bear to hear him say that! "To you? Don't you really believe how she loves you?"

Sir Claude examined his belief. "Of course I know she's wonderful."

"She's just every bit as fond of you as _I_ am," said Maisie. "She told me so yesterday."

"Ah then," he promptly exclaimed, "she HAS tried to affect you! I don't love HER, don't you see? I do her perfect justice," he pursued, "but I mean I don't love her as I do you, and I'm sure you wouldn't seriously expect it. She's not my daughter--come, old chap! She's not even my mother, though I dare say it would have been better for me if she had been. I'll do for her what I'd do for my mother, but I won't do more."

His real excitement broke out in a need to explain and justify himself, though he kept trying to correct and conceal it with laughs and mouthfuls and other vain familiarities. Suddenly he broke off, wiping his moustache with sharp pulls and coming back to Mrs. Beale. "Did she try to talk YOU over?"

"No--to me she said very little. Very little indeed," Maisie continued.

Sir Claude seemed struck with this. "She was only sweet to Mrs. Wix?"

"As sweet as sugar!" cried Maisie.

He looked amused at her comparison, but he didn't contest it; he uttered on the contrary, in an a.s.senting way, a little inarticulate sound. "I know what she CAN be. But much good may it have done her! Mrs. Wix won't COME 'round.' That's what makes it so fearfully awkward."

Maisie knew it was fearfully awkward; she had known this now, she felt, for some time, and there was something else it more pressingly concerned her to learn. "What is it you meant you came over to ask me?"

"Well," said Sir Claude, "I was just going to say. Let me tell you it will surprise you." She had finished breakfast now and she sat back in her chair again: she waited in silence to hear. He had pushed the things before him a little way and had his elbows on the table. This time, she was convinced, she knew what was coming, and once more, for the crash, as with Mrs. Wix lately in her room, she held her breath and drew together her eyelids. He was going to say she must give him up. He looked hard at her again; then he made his effort. "Should you see your way to let her go?"

She was bewildered. "To let who--?"

"Mrs. Wix simply. I put it at the worst. Should you see your way to sacrifice her? Of course I know what I'm asking."

Maisie's eyes opened wide again; this was so different from what she had expected. "And stay with you alone?"

He gave another push to his coffee-cup. "With me and Mrs. Beale. Of course it would be rather rum; but everything in our whole story is rather rum, you know. What's more unusual than for any one to be given up, like you, by her parents?"

"Oh nothing is more unusual than THAT!" Maisie concurred, relieved at the contact of a proposition as to which concurrence could have lucidity.

"Of course it would be quite unconventional," Sir Claude went on--"I mean the little household we three should make together; but things have got beyond that, don't you see? They got beyond that long ago. We shall stay abroad at any rate--it's ever so much easier and it's our affair and n.o.body else's: it's no one's business but ours on all the blessed earth. I don't say that for Mrs. Wix, poor dear--I do her absolute justice. I respect her; I see what she means; she has done me a lot of good. But there are the facts. There they are, simply. And here am I, and here are you. And she won't come round. She's right from her point of view. I'm talking to you in the most extraordinary way--I'm always talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain't I? One would think you were about sixty and that I--I don't know what any one would think _I_ am. Unless a beastly cad!" he suggested. "I've been awfully worried, and this's what it has come to. You've done us the most tremendous good, and you'll do it still and always, don't you see? We can't let you go--you're everything. There are the facts as I say. She IS your mother now, Mrs. Beale, by what has happened, and I, in the same way, I'm your father. No one can contradict that, and we can't get out of it. My idea would be a nice little place--somewhere in the South--where she and you would be together and as good as any one else. And I should be as good too, don't you see? for I shouldn't live with you, but I should be close to you--just round the corner, and it would be just the same. My idea would be that it should all be perfectly open and frank. _Honi soit qui mal y pense_, don't you know? You're the best thing--you and what we can do for you--that either of us has ever known," he came back to that.

"When I say to her 'Give her up, come,' she lets me have it bang in the face: 'Give her up yourself!' It's the same old vicious circle--and when I say vicious I don't mean a pun, a what-d'-ye-call-'em. Mrs. Wix is the obstacle; I mean, you know, if she has affected you. She has affected ME, and yet here I am. I never was in such a tight place: please believe it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't that--to put it so--just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday, in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her own self.' So I do, old girl--I put it to you. CAN you choose freely?"

This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and embarra.s.sed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it--I haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and b.u.t.tered rolls to betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well--to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"