face, which produced the effect of
a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have
been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie
herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a
simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had
ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she
slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a
little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into
clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.
Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had
together a _cafe complet_ in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side
had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the
precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her
with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied
in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing
even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for
the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent
insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any
it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had
now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was
still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of
dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily
was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there--he's there!" she
had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation
to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so
rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her
only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not
having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently
being found in the salon.

"He's there--he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the
child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."

"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.

"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she
reiterated.

"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.

She waited an instant. "God knows!"

Maisie wondered a little why, or how, God should know; this, however,
delayed but an instant her bringing out: "Well, won't she go back?"

"Go ba