to contribute.

"He never went--the hound!"

That, according to Sir Claude, had been also what her mother had not
done, and Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a maturer
mind would be called the way history repeats itself.

"Who IS she?" she asked again.

Mrs. Beale, fixed to the spot, seemed lost in the vision of an
opportunity missed. "If he had only seen me!"--it came from between her
teeth. "She's a brand-new one. But he must have been with her since
Tuesday."

Maisie took it in. "She's almost black," she then reported.

"They're always hideous," said Mrs. Beale.

This was a remark on which the child had again to reflect. "Oh not his
WIVES!" she remonstrantly exclaimed. The words at another moment would
probably have set her friend "off," but Mrs. Beale was now, in her
instant vigilance, too immensely "on." "Did you ever in your life see
such a feather?" Maisie presently continued.

This decoration appeared to have paused at some distance, and in spite
of intervening groups they could both look at it. "Oh that's the way
they dress--the vulgarest of the vulgar!"

"They're coming back--they'll see us!" Maisie the next moment cried;
and while her companion answered that this was exactly what she wanted
and the child returned "Here they are--here they are!" the unconscious
subjects of so much attention, with a change of mind about their
direction, quickly retraced their steps and precipitated themselves upon
their critics. Their unconsciousness gave Mrs. Beale time to leap, under
her breath, to a recognition which Maisie caught.

"It must be Mrs. Cuddon!"

Maisie looked at Mrs. Cuddon hard--her lips even echoed the name. What
followed was extraordinarily rapid--a minute of livelier battle than had
ever yet, in so short a span at least, been waged round our heroine. The
muffled shock--lest people should notice--was violent, and it was only
for her later thought that the steps fell into their order, the steps
through which, in a bewilderment not so much of sound as of silence, she
had come to find herself, too soon for comprehension and too strangely
for fear, at the door of the Exhibition with her father. He thrust her
into a hansom and got in after her, and then it was--as she drove along
with him--that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face
with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment
of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and