Chapter 29 - Page 2

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. "God knows!"

Maisie wondered a little why, or how, God 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 tittered.

"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 asserted with sudden energy.

Maisie wondered again. "A slave?"

"To his passions."

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