There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint
she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So
the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the
long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding
in the fury of it--she had had a glimpse of the game of football--a sort
of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often
an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if
she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane
of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she
waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however,
didn't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened
his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's,
and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their
companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said:
"Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she's rather too grand about it.
I mean the situation isn't after all quite so desperate or quite so
simple. But I give you my word before her, and I give it to her before
you, that I'll never, never, forsake you. Do you hear that, old fellow,
and do you take it in? I'll stick to you through everything."
Maisie did take it in--took it with a long tremor of all her little
being; and then as, to emphasise it, he drew her closer she buried her
head on his shoulder and cried without sound and without pain.
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