u
did!" His hands went up and down gently on her shoulders.

Mrs. Wix so dominated the situation that she had something sharp for
every one. "There you have it, you see!" she pregnantly remarked to her
pupil.

"WILL you give him up?" Maisie persisted to Mrs. Beale.

"To YOU, you abominable little horror?" that lady indignantly enquired,
"and to this raving old demon who has filled your dreadful little mind
with her wickedness? Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these
years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you
did?"

"I love Sir Claude--I love HIM," Maisie replied with an awkward sense
that she appeared to offer it as something that would do as well. Sir
Claude had continued to pat her, and it was really an answer to his
pats.

"She hates you--she hates you," he observed with the oddest quietness to
Mrs. Beale.

His quietness made her blaze. "And you back her up in it and give me up
to outrage?"

"No; I only insist that she's free--she's free."

Mrs. Beale stared--Mrs. Beale glared. "Free to starve with this pauper
lunatic?"

"I'll do more for her than YOU ever did!" Mrs. Wix retorted. "I'll work
my fingers to the bone."

Maisie, with Sir Claude's hands still on her shoulders, felt, just as
she felt the fine surrender in them, that over her head he looked in a
certain way at Mrs. Wix. "You needn't do that," she heard him say. "She
has means."

"Means?--Maisie?" Mrs. Beale shrieked. "Means that her vile father has
stolen!"

"I'll get them back--I'll get them back. I'll look into it." He smiled
and nodded at Mrs. Wix.

This had a fearful effect on his other friend. "Haven't I looked into
it, I should like to know, and haven't I found an abyss? It's too
inconceivable--your cruelty to me!" she wildly broke out. She had hot
tears in her eyes.

He spoke to her very kindly, almost coaxingly. "We'll look into it
again; we'll look into it together. It IS an abyss, but he CAN be
made--or Ida can. Think of the money they're getting now!" he laughed.
"It's all right, it's all right," he continued. "It wouldn't do--it
wouldn't do. We CAN'T work her in. It's perfectly true--she's unique.
We're not good enough--oh no!" and, quite exuberantly, he laughed again.

"Not good enough, and that beast IS?" Mrs. Beale shouted.

At this for a moment there was a hush in the room, and in the midst of
it Sir Claude replied to the question by moving with Maisie to Mrs. Wix.
The next thing