nd that she could see to be on her
companion's desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing
Mrs. Wix so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious
of being at the same time the subject of a like aim. The business went
the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it; it then
fell into its place in her general, her habitual view of the particular
phenomenon that, had she felt the need of words for it, she might have
called her personal relation to her knowledge. This relation had never
been so lively as during the time she waited with her old governess for
Sir Claude's reappearance, and what made it so was exactly that Mrs. Wix
struck her as having a new suspicion of it. Mrs. Wix had never yet had a
suspicion--this was certain--so calculated to throw her pupil, in spite
of the closer union of such adventurous hours, upon the deep defensive.
Her pupil made out indeed as many marvels as she had made out on the
rush to Folkestone; and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs.
Wix was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wix's, during these hours,
Sir Claude was--and most of all through long pauses--the perpetual, the
insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his
marriage and to the place he held in the schoolroom at that crisis of
love and pain; only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the
large consciousness he then filled out.

They went through it all again, and indeed while the interval dragged
by the very weight of its charm they went, in spite of defences and
suspicions, through everything. Their intensified clutch of the future
throbbed like a clock ticking seconds; but this was a timepiece that
inevitably, as well, at the best, rang occasionally a portentous hour.
Oh there were several of these, and two or three of the worst on the old
city-wall where everything else so made for peace. There was nothing
in the world Maisie more wanted than to be as nice to Mrs. Wix as Sir
Claude had desired; but it was exactly because this fell in with her
inveterate instinct of keeping the peace that the instinct itself
was quickened. From the moment it was quickened, however, it found
other work, and that was how, to begin with, she produced the very
complication she most sought to avert. What she had essentially done,
these days, had been to read the unspoken into the spoken; so that thus,
with accumulations, it had become more definite to her that