ower Street, something in a big jar that,
amid an array of strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a
beautiful yellow was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry
on that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment sorrier
for herself. Oh nothing had ever made for twinges like mamma's manner of
saying: "The Captain? What Captain?"

"Why when we met you in the Gardens--the one who took me to sit with
him. That was exactly what HE said."

Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost
thread. "What on earth did he say?"

Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. "What you
say, mamma--that you're so good."

"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the
hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid
the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. "I say you're
a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth!" This
was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only
feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their
communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. "What
business have you to speak to me of him?"

Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."

"Him!--the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again, and in
the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.

Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and
she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet
lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any
one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he WAS, and it
made me like him. He said things--they were beautiful, they were, they
were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for
even in the midst of her surge of passion--of which in fact it was a
part--there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious,
of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a
loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully
saw--saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I've
thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him--with him--"
Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.

But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror--?"

"That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you. I mea