culate
with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. "IS it a crime?" Maisie
then asked.

Mrs. Wix was as prompt as if she had been crouching in a lair. "Branded
by the Bible."

"Well, he won't commit a crime."

Mrs. Wix looked at her gloomily. "He's committing one now."

"Now?"

"In being with her."

Maisie had it on her tongue's end to return once more: "But now he's
free." She remembered, however, in time that one of the things she had
known for the last entire hour was that this made no difference. After
that, and as if to turn the right way, she was on the point of a blind
dash, a weak reversion to the reminder that it might make a difference,
might diminish the crime for Mrs. Beale; till such a reflexion was in
its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wix's face of the
collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner that after
all her pains her pupil didn't even yet adequately understand. Never so
much as when confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her
thought for a minute centred in the effort to come out with something
which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "Just TRUST me, dear;
that's all!"--she came out finally with that; and it was perhaps a good
sign of her action that with a long, impartial moan Mrs. Wix floated her
to bed.

There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude--which Mrs. Wix let
out that she deemed the worst of omens; yet it was just for the quieter
communion they so got with him that, when after the coffee and rolls
which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh
drafts upon his credit they wandered again up the hill to the rampart
instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into
the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded
Virgin; they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once
more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became
definite about their friend's silence. "He IS afraid of her! She has
forbidden him to write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but
her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results.
The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wix, with
a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an
allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found
herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid,
as we have seen, of t