ir Claude had taken her: she saw
nothing in it but what it directly conveyed. "And shall I never, never
see you again--?"

"If I do go to America?" Beale brought it out like a man. "Never, never,
never!"

Hereupon, with the utmost absurdity, she broke down; everything gave
way, everything but the horror of hearing herself definitely utter such
an ugliness as the acceptance of that. So she only stiffened herself and
said: "Then I can't give you up."

She held him some seconds looking at her, showing her a strained
grimace, a perfect parade of all his teeth, in which it seemed to her
she could read the disgust he didn't quite like to express at this
departure from the pliability she had practically promised. But before
she could attenuate in any way the crudity of her collapse he gave an
impatient jerk which took him to the window. She heard a vehicle stop;
Beale looked out; then he freshly faced her. He still said nothing, but
she knew the Countess had come back. There was a silence again between
them, but with a different shade of embarrassment from that of their
united arrival; and it was still without speaking that, abruptly
repeating one of the embraces of which he had already been so prodigal,
he whisked her back to the lemon sofa just before the door of the room
was thrown open. It was thus in renewed and intimate union with him that
she was presented to a person whom she instantly recognised as the brown
lady.

The brown lady looked almost as astonished, though not quite as alarmed,
as when, at the Exhibition, she had gasped in the face of Mrs. Beale.
Maisie in truth almost gasped in her own; this was with the fuller
perception that she was brown indeed. She literally struck the child
more as an animal than as a "real" lady; she might have been a clever
frizzled poodle in a frill or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled
petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big and eyes that were far
too small and a moustache that was, well, not so happy a feature as Sir
Claude's. Beale jumped up to her; while, to the child's astonishment,
though as if in a quick intensity of thought, the Countess advanced as
gaily as if, for many a day, nothing awkward had happened for any one.
Maisie, in spite of a large acquaintance with the phenomenon, had
never seen it so promptly established that nothing awkward was to be
mentioned. The next minute the Countess had kissed her and exclaimed to
Beale with bright tender reproach: "Why