istory in as separate a manner as if
she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane
of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she
waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however,
didn't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened
his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's,
and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their
companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said:

"Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she's rather too grand about it.
I mean the situation isn't after all quite so desperate or quite so
simple. But I give you my word before her, and I give it to her before
you, that I'll never, never, forsake you. Do you hear that, old fellow,
and do you take it in? I'll stick to you through everything."

Maisie did take it in--took it with a long tremor of all her little
being; and then as, to emphasise it, he drew her closer she buried her
head on his shoulder and cried without sound and without pain. While she
was so engaged she became aware that his own breast was agitated, and
gathered from it with rapture that his tears were as silently flowing.
Presently she heard a loud sob from Mrs. Wix--Mrs. Wix was the only one
who made a noise.

She was to have made, for some time, none other but this, though
within a few days, in conversation with her pupil, she described her
intercourse with Ida as little better than the state of being battered.
There was as yet nevertheless no attempt to eject her by force, and she
recognised that Sir Claude, taking such a stand as never before, had
intervened with passion and with success. As Maisie remembered--and
remembered wholly without disdain--that he had told her he was afraid of
her ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of
what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was
really prepared to do. Mrs. Wix spoke to her of the pecuniary sacrifice
by which she herself purchased the scant security she enjoyed and which,
if it was a defence against the hand of violence, yet left her exposed
to incredible rudeness. Didn't her ladyship find every hour of the
day some artful means to humiliate and trample upon her? There was a
quarter's salary owing her--a great name, even Maisie could suspect,
for a small matter; she should never see it as long as she lived, but
keeping quiet about it put h