slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and
falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and
embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter
so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see
intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more
that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word
that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it--I
haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it
IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here
into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to
betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well--to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the
most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"

"Back to London."

"But I mean what will she do?"

"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our
difficulties."

That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been.
"Then who'll teach me?"

Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"

She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."

"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've
positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another
governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one--not of the
only kind that would do. It wouldn't do--the kind that WOULD do," he
queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay--heigh-ho! We'd
do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I CAN now; I haven't got to
mind--what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did--she can show out WITH
me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."

It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less,
while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made
persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct--an old woman
and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the
rampart of the _haute ville_. It was just at that hour yesterday; they
were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet
understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.

"I do--I do. But for all that--" And he gave, turning in his conscious
exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion
could recognise, of