"So you are doing what you want?" Maisie asked.
"Rather, Miss Farange!"
Miss Farange turned it over. "And she's doing the same?"
"Up to the hilt!"
Again she considered. "Then, please, what may it be?"
"I wouldn't tell you for the whole world."
She gazed at a gaunt Madonna; after which she broke into a slow smile. "Well, I don't care, so long as you do let her."
"Oh you monster!"—and Sir Claude's gay vehemence brought him to his feet.
Another day, in another place—a place in Baker Street where at a hungry hour she had sat down with him to tea and buns—he brought out a question disconnected from previous talk. "I say, you know, what do you suppose your father would do?"
Maisie hadn't long to cast about or to question his pleasant eyes. "If you were really to go with us? He'd make a great complaint."
He seemed amused at the term she employed. "Oh I shouldn't mind a 'complaint'!"
"He'd talk to every one about it," said Maisie.
"Well, I shouldn't mind that either."
"Of course not," the child hastened to respond. "You've told me you're not afraid of him."
"The question is are you?" said Sir Claude.
Maisie candidly considered; then she spoke resolutely. "No, not of papa."
"But of somebody else?"
"Certainly, of lots of people."
"Of your mother first and foremost of course."
"Dear, yes; more of mamma than of—than of—"
"Than of what?" Sir Claude asked as she hesitated for a comparison.
She thought over all objects of dread. "Than of a wild elephant!" she at last declared. "And you are too," she reminded him as he laughed.
"Oh yes, I am too."
Again she meditated. "Why then did you marry her?"
"Just because I was afraid."
"Even when she loved you?"
"That made her the more alarming."
For Maisie herself, though her companion seemed to find it droll, this opened up depths of gravity. "More alarming than she is now?"
"Well, in a different way. Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds."
She took this in with complete intelligence. "Then I think I've got them all."
"You?" her friend cried. "Nonsense! You're thoroughly 'game.'"
"I'm awfully afraid of Mrs. Beale," Maisie objected.
He raised his smooth brows. "That charming woman?"
"Well," she answered, "you can't understand it because you're not in the same state."
She had been going on with a luminous "But" when, across the table, he laid his hand on her arm. "I can understand it," he confessed. "I am in the same state."
"Oh but she likes you so!" Maisie promptly pleaded.
Sir Claude literally coloured. "That has something to do with it."
Maisie wondered again. "Being liked with being afraid?"
"Yes, when it amounts to adoration."
"Then why aren't you afraid of me?"
"Because with you it amounts to that?" He had kept his hand on her arm. "Well, what prevents is simply that you're the gentlest spirit on earth. Besides—" he pursued; but he came to a pause.
"Besides—?"
"I should be in fear if you were older—there! See—you already make me talk nonsense," the young man added. "The question's about your father. Is he likewise afraid of Mrs. Beale?"
"I think not. And yet he loves her," Maisie mused.
"Oh no—he doesn't; not a bit!" After which, as his companion stared, Sir Claude apparently felt that he must make this oddity fit with her recollections. "There's nothing of that sort now."
But Maisie only stared the more. "They've changed?"
"Like your mother and me."
She wondered how he knew. "Then you've seen Mrs. Beale again?"
He demurred. "Oh no. She has written to me," he presently subjoined. "She's not afraid of your father either. No one at all is—really." Then he went on while Maisie's little mind, with its filial spring too relaxed from of old for a pang at this want of parental majesty, speculated on the vague relation between Mrs. Beale's courage and the question, for Mrs. Wix and herself, of a neat lodging with their friend. "She wouldn't care a bit if Mr. Farange should make a row."
"Do you mean about you and me and Mrs. Wix? Why should she care? It wouldn't hurt her."
Sir Claude, with his legs out and his hand diving into his trousers-pocket, threw back his head with a laugh just perceptibly tempered, as she thought, by a sigh. "My dear stepchild, you're delightful! Look here, we must pay. You've had five buns?"
"How can you?" Maisie demanded, crimson under the eye of the young woman who had stepped to their board. "I've had three."
Shortly after this Mrs. Wix looked so ill that it was to be feared her ladyship had treated her to some unexampled passage. Maisie asked if anything worse than usual had occurred; whereupon the poor woman brought out with infinite gloom: "He has been seeing Mrs. Beale."
"Sir Claude?" The child remembered what he had said. "Oh no—not seeing her!"
"I beg your pardon. I absolutely know it." Mrs. Wix was as positive as she was dismal.
Maisie nevertheless ventured to challenge her. "And how, please, do you know it?"
She faltered a moment. "From herself. I've been to see her."
Then on Maisie's visible surprise: "I went yesterday while you were out with him. He has seen her repeatedly."
It was not wholly clear to Maisie why Mrs. Wix should be prostrate at this discovery; but her general consciousness of the way things could be both perpetrated and resented always eased off for her the strain of the particular mystery. "There may be some mistake. He says he hasn't."
Mrs. Wix turned paler, as if this were a still deeper ground for alarm. "He says so?—he denies that he has seen her?"
"He told me so three days ago. Perhaps she's mistaken," Maisie suggested.
"Do you mean perhaps she lies? She lies whenever it suits her, I'm very sure. But I know when people lie—and that's what I've loved in you, that you never do. Mrs. Beale didn't yesterday at any rate. He has seen her."
Maisie was silent a little. "He says not," she then repeated. "Perhaps—perhaps—" Once more she paused.
"Do you mean perhaps he lies?"
"Gracious goodness, no!" Maisie shouted.
Mrs. Wix's bitterness, however, again overflowed. "He does, he does," she cried, "and it's that that's just the worst of it! They'll take you, they'll take you, and what in the world will then become of me?" She threw herself afresh upon her pupil and wept over her with the inevitable effect of causing the child's own tears to flow. But Maisie couldn't have told you if she had been crying at the image of their separation or at that of Sir Claude's untruth. As regards this deviation it was agreed between them that they were not in a position to bring it home to him. Mrs. Wix was in dread of doing anything to make him, as she said, "worse"; and Maisie was sufficiently initiated to be able to reflect that in speaking to her as he had done he had only wished to be tender of Mrs. Beale. It fell in with all her inclinations to think of him as tender, and she forbore to let him know that the two ladies had, as she would never do, betrayed him.