Maisie could perfectly embrace, but it still left
a loophole for triumph. She turned it well over. "You mean if mamma
doesn't come back ever at all?" The composure with which her face was
presented to that prospect would have shown a spectator the long road
she had travelled. "Well, but that won't put Mrs. Beale--"

"In the same comfortable position--?" Beale took her up with relish; he
had sprung to his feet again, shaking his legs and looking at his shoes.
"Right you are, darling! Something more will be wanted for Mrs. Beale."
He just paused, then he added: "But she may not have long to wait for
it."

Maisie also for a minute looked at his shoes, though they were not the
pair she most admired, the laced yellow "uppers" and patent-leather
complement. At last, with a question, she raised her eyes. "Aren't you
coming back?"

Once more he hung fire; after which he gave a small laugh that in the
oddest way in the world reminded her of the unique sounds she had
heard emitted by Mrs. Wix. "It may strike you as extraordinary that I
should make you such an admission; and in point of fact you're not to
understand that I do. But we'll put it that way to help your decision.
The point is that that's the way my wife will presently be sure to put
it. You'll hear her shrieking that she's deserted, so that she may just
pile up her wrongs. She'll be as free as she likes then--as free, you
see, as your mother's muff of a husband. They won't have anything more
to consider and they'll just put you into the street. Do I understand,"
Beale enquired, "that, in the face of what I press on you, you still
prefer to take the risk of that?" It was the most wonderful appeal any
gentleman had ever addressed to his daughter, and it had placed Maisie
in the middle of the room again while her father moved slowly about her
with his hands in his pockets and something in his step that seemed,
more than anything else he had done, to show the habit of the place.
She turned her fevered little eyes over his friend's brightnesses, as
if, on her own side, to press for some help in a quandary unexampled.
As if also the pressure reached him he after an instant stopped short,
completing the prodigy of his attitude and the pride of his loyalty by
a supreme formulation of the general inducement. "You've an eye, love!
Yes, there's money. No end of money."

This affected her at first in the manner of some great flashing dazzle
in one of the pantomimes to which S