Her companion went into it merely so far as the
question of what then they were to do with them; on which Mrs. Beale,
who had by this time put them into her pocket, replied with dignity
and with her hand on the place: "We're to send them back on the spot!"
Susan, the child soon afterwards learnt, had been invited to contribute
to this act of restitution her one appropriated coin; but a closer
clutch of the treasure showed in her private assurance to Maisie that
there was a limit to the way she could be "done." Maisie had been open
with Mrs. Beale about the whole of last night's transaction; but she
now found herself on the part of their indignant inferior a recipient
of remarks that were so many ringing tokens of that lady's own
suppressions. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour--it was
three in the morning if she really wanted to know--at which Mrs. Beale
had re-entered the house; another, in accents as to which Maisie's
criticism was still intensely tacit, characterised her appeal as such
a "gime," such a "shime," as one had never had to put up with; a
third treated with some vigour the question of the enormous sums due
belowstairs, in every department, for gratuitous labour and wasted zeal.
Our young lady's consciousness was indeed mainly filled for several
days with the apprehension created by the too slow subsidence of her
attendant's sense of wrong. These days would become terrific like the
Revolutions she had learnt by heart in Histories if an outbreak in the
kitchen should crown them; and to promote that prospect she had through
Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions are
prepared.
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