This critic, with these words, struck her
disciple as cropping up, after the manner of mamma when mamma talked,
quite in a new place. The child stared as at the jump of a kangaroo.
"Save him from what?"
Mrs. Wix debated, then covered a still greater distance. "Why just from
awful misery."
XII
She had not at the moment explained her ominous speech, but the light of
remarkable events soon enabled her companion to read it. It may indeed
be said that these days brought on a high quickening of Maisie's direct
perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make out things for herself.
This was helped by an emotion intrinsically far from sweet--the increase
of the alarm that had most haunted her meditations. She had no need to
be told, as on the morrow of the revelation of Sir Claude's danger she
was told by Mrs. Wix, that her mother wanted more and more to know why
the devil her father didn't send for her: she had too long expected
mamma's curiosity on this point to express itself sharply. Maisie could
meet such pressure so far as meeting it was to be in a position to
reply, in words directly inspired, that papa would be hanged before he'd
again be saddled with her. She therefore recognised the hour that in
troubled glimpses she had long foreseen, the hour when--the phrase for
it came back to her from Mrs. Beale--with two fathers, two mothers and
two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn't know "wherever" to
go. Such apprehension as she felt on this score was not diminished
by the fact that Mrs.
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