verything, even the great interests in America and yet
more the first flush of that superiority to Mrs. Beale and to mamma
which had been expressed in Sevres sets and silver boxes. These were
still there, but perhaps there were no great interests in America.
Mamma had known an American who was not a bit like this one. She was
not, however, of noble rank; her name was only Mrs. Tucker. Maisie's
detachment would none the less have been more complete if she had not
suddenly had to exclaim: "Oh dear, I haven't any money!"

Her father's teeth, at this, were such a picture of appetite without
action as to be a match for any plea of poverty. "Make your stepmother
pay."

"Stepmothers DON'T pay!" cried the Countess. "No stepmother ever paid
in her life!" The next moment they were in the street together, and the
next the child was in the cab, with the Countess, on the pavement, but
close to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out of a pocket.
Her father had vanished and there was even yet nothing in that to
reawaken the pang of loss. "Here's money," said the brown lady: "go!"
The sound was commanding: the cab rattled off. Maisie sat there with her
hand full of coin. All that for a cab? As they passed a street-lamp she
bent to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of sovereigns. There
MUST then have been great interests in America. It was still at any rate
the Arabian Nights.

XX

The money was far too much even for a fee in a fairy-tale, and in the
absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the hour was now late, had not yet
returned to the Regent's Park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as loud as Maisie
was low and as bold as she was bland, produced, on the exhibition
offered under the dim vigil of the lamp that made the place a
contrast to the child's recent scene of light, the half-crown that an
unsophisticated cabman could pronounce to be the least he would take. It
was apparently long before Mrs. Beale would arrive, and in the interval
Maisie had been induced by the prompt Susan not only to go to bed like
a darling dear, but, in still richer expression of that character, to
devote to the repayment of obligations general as well as particular
one of the sovereigns in the ordered array that, on the dressing-table
upstairs, was naturally not less dazzling to a lone orphan of a
housemaid than to the subject of the manoeuvres of a quartette. This
subject went to sleep with her property gathered into a knotted
handkerch