it for so high a
motive? Think of the beauty of it," the good lady pressed.

"Of bolting with YOU?" Sir Claude ejaculated.

She faintly smiled--she even faintly coloured. "So far from doing you
harm it will do you the highest good. Sir Claude, if you'll listen to
me, it will save you."

"Save me from what?"

Maisie, at this question, waited with renewed suspense for an answer
that would bring the thing to some finer point than their companion
had brought it to before. But there was on the contrary only more
mystification in Mrs. Wix's reply. "Ah from you know what!"

"Do you mean from some other woman!"

"Yes--from a real bad one."

Sir Claude at least, the child could see, was not mystified; so little
indeed that a smile of intelligence broke afresh in his eyes. He turned
them in vague discomfort to Maisie, and then something in the way she
met them caused him to chuck her playfully under the chin. It was not
till after this that he good-naturedly met Mrs. Wix. "You think me much
worse than I am."

"If that were true," she returned, "I wouldn't appeal to you. I do, Sir
Claude, in the name of all that's good in you--and oh so earnestly! We
can help each other. What you'll do for our young friend here I needn't
say. That isn't even what I want to speak of now. What I want to speak
of is what you'll GET--don't you see?--from such an opportunity to take
hold. Take hold of US--take hold of HER. Make her your duty--make her
your life: she'll repay you a thousand-fold!"

It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie's contemplation
transferred itself: partly because, though her heart was in her throat
for trepidation, her delicacy deterred her from appearing herself to
press the question; partly from the coercion of seeing Mrs. Wix come out
as Mrs. Wix had never come before--not even on the day of her call at
Mrs. Beale's with the news of mamma's marriage. On that day Mrs. Beale
had surpassed her in dignity, but nobody could have surpassed her now.
There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint
she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So
the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the
long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding
in the fury of it--she had had a glimpse of the game of football--a sort
of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often
an odd air of being present at her h