The great effect
of their encounter had been to confirm her sense of being launched with
Sir Claude, to make it rich and full beyond anything she had dreamed,
and everything now conspired to suggest that a single soft touch of her
small hand would complete the good work and set her ladyship so promptly
and majestically afloat as to leave the great seaway clear for the
morrow. This was the more the case as her hand had for some moments been
rendered free by a marked manoeuvre of both of her mother's. One of
these capricious members had fumbled with visible impatience in some
backward depth of drapery and had presently reappeared with a small
article in its grasp. The act had a significance for a little person
trained, in that relation, from an early age, to keep an eye on manual
motions, and its possible bearing was not darkened by the memory of the
handful of gold that Susan Ash would never, never believe Mrs. Beale had
sent back--"not she; she's too false and too greedy!"--to the munificent
Countess. To have guessed, none the less, that her ladyship's purse
might be the real figure of the object extracted from the rustling
covert at her rear--this suspicion gave on the spot to the child's eyes
a direction carefully distant. It added moreover to the optimism that
for an hour could ruffle the surface of her deep diplomacy, ruffle it
to the point of making her forget that she had never been safe unless
she had also been stupid. She in short forgot her habitual caution in
her impulse to adopt her ladyship's practical interests and show her
ladyship how perfectly she understood them.
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