happiness at
last clutched again. There was almost as vivid a bloom in her maturity
as in mamma's, and it took her but a short time to give her little
friend an impression of positive power--an impression that seemed to
begin like a long bright day. This was a perception on Maisie's part
that neither mamma, nor Sir Claude, nor Mrs. Wix, with their immense and
so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled, and that made an
immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to
her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that
he wouldn't be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an
immense one--she speedily made known as much; but Mrs. Beale from this
moment presented herself to Maisie as a person to whom a great gift had
come. The great gift was just for handling complications. Maisie felt
how little she made of them when, after she had dropped to Sir Claude
some recall of a previous meeting, he made answer, with a sound of
consternation and yet an air of relief, that he had denied to their
companion their having, since the day he came for her, seen each other
till that moment.

Mrs. Beale could but vaguely pity it. "Why did you do anything so
silly?"

"To protect your reputation."

"From Maisie?" Mrs. Beale was much amused. "My reputation with Maisie is
too good to suffer."

"But you believed me, you rascal, didn't you?" Sir Claude asked of the
child.

She looked at him; she smiled. "Her reputation did suffer. I discovered
you had been here."

He was not too chagrined to laugh. "The way, my dear, you talk of that
sort of thing!"

"How should she talk," Mrs. Beale wanted to know, "after all this
wretched time with her mother?"

"It was not mamma who told me," Maisie explained. "It was only Mrs.
Wix." She was hesitating whether to bring out before Sir Claude the
source of Mrs. Wix's information; but Mrs. Beale, addressing the young
man, showed the vanity of scruples.

"Do you know that preposterous person came to see me a day or two
ago?--when I told her I had seen you repeatedly."

Sir Claude, for once in a way, was disconcerted. "The old cat! She never
told me. Then you thought I had lied?" he demanded of Maisie.

She was flurried by the term with which he had qualified her gentle
friend, but she took the occasion for one to which she must in every
manner lend herself. "Oh I didn't mind! But Mrs. Wix did," she added
with an intention benevo