presented was the spasm within
her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her
examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears
she had kept down at the station. They had nothing--no, distinctly
nothing--to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat
shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know--I don't know."

"Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed
the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've
killed it when it had begun to live."

She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir
Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed
lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think
I've produced life. I don't know what to call it--I haven't even known
how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's
the most beautiful thing I've ever met--it's exquisite, it's sacred." He
had his hands in his pockets and, though a trace of the sickness he had
just shown perhaps lingered there, his face bent itself with
extraordinary gentleness on both the friends he was about to lose. "Do
you know what I came back for?" he asked of the elder.

"I think I do!" cried Mrs. Wix, surprisingly un-mollified and with the
heat of her late engagement with Mrs. Beale still on her brow. That
lady, as if a little besprinkled by such turns of the tide, uttered a
loud inarticulate protest and, averting herself, stood a moment at the
window.

"I came back with a proposal," said Sir Claude.

"To me?" Mrs. Wix asked.

"To Maisie. That she should give you up."

"And does she?"

Sir Claude wavered. "Tell her!" he then exclaimed to the child, also
turning away as if to give her the chance. But Mrs. Wix and her pupil
stood confronted in silence, Maisie whiter than ever--more awkward,
more rigid and yet more dumb. They looked at each other hard, and as
nothing came from them Sir Claude faced about again. "You won't tell
her?--you can't?" Still she said nothing; whereupon, addressing Mrs.
Wix, he broke into a kind of ecstasy. "She refused--she refused!"

Maisie, at this, found her voice. "I didn't refuse. I didn't," she
repeated.

It brought Mrs. Beale straight back to her. "You accepted, angel--you
accepted!" She threw herself upon the child and, before Maisie could
resist, had sunk with her upon the sofa, possessed of her, encircling
her. "You've given her up alre