the child knew she was at that lady's side with an arm
firmly grasped. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. "Let them pass," said
Sir Claude at last.

She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other.
Then she saw Mrs. Beale turn to her. "I'm your mother now, Maisie. And
he's your father."

"That's just where it is!" sighed Mrs. Wix with an effect of irony
positively detached and philosophic.

Mrs. Beale continued to address her young friend, and her effort to be
reasonable and tender was in its way remarkable. "We're representative,
you know, of Mr. Farange and his former wife. This person represents
mere illiterate presumption. We take our stand on the law."

"Oh the law, the law!" Mrs. Wix superbly jeered. "You had better indeed
let the law have a look at you!"

"Let them pass--let them pass!" Sir Claude pressed his friend hard--he
pleaded.

But she fastened herself still to Maisie. "DO you hate me, dearest?"

Maisie looked at her with new eyes, but answered as she had answered
before. "Will you give him up?"

Mrs. Beale's rejoinder hung fire, but when it came it was noble. "You
shouldn't talk to me of such things!" She was shocked, she was
scandalised to tears.

For Mrs. Wix, however, it was her discrimination that was indelicate.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she roundly cried.

Sir Claude made a supreme appeal. "Will you be so good as to allow these
horrors to terminate?"

Mrs. Beale fixed her eyes on him, and again Maisie watched them. "You
should do him justice," Mrs. Wix went on to Mrs. Beale. "We've always
been devoted to him, Maisie and I--and he has shown how much he likes
us. He would like to please her; he would like even, I think, to please
me. But he hasn't given you up."

They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie's
observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this
particular moment. "Yes, my dear, I haven't given you up," Sir Claude
said to Mrs. Beale at last, "and if you'd like me to treat our friends
here as solemn witnesses I don't mind giving you my word for it that I
never never will. There!" he dauntlessly exclaimed.

"He can't!" Mrs. Wix tragically commented.

Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face
about. "He can't!" she literally mocked.

"He can't, he can't, he can't!"--Sir Claude's gay emphasis wonderfully
carried it off.

Mrs. Beale took it all in, yet she held her ground; on which Mais