They've been together."
For an instant this looked ominous--a fear came into her eyes. "Then
she hasn't gone?"
"Your mother?--to South Africa? I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude
said; and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood
there and with a kind of absent gaze--absent, that is, from HER
affairs--followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife
who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His
thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. "But I dare say it's all
right. She wouldn't come if it wasn't, poor old thing: she knows rather
well what she's about."
This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it
fit into her dream. "Well, what IS she about?"
He finally stopped looking at the fishwife--he met his companion's
enquiry. "Oh you know!" There was something in the way he said it that
made, between them, more of an equality than she had yet imagined; but
it had also more the effect of raising her up than of letting him down,
and what it did with her was shown by the sound of her assent.
"Yes--I know!" What she knew, what she COULD know is by this time no
secret to us: it grew and grew at any rate, the rest of that day, in the
air of what he took for granted. It was better he should do that than
attempt to test her knowledge; but there at the worst was the gist of
the matter: it was open between them at last that their great change,
as, speaking as if it had already lasted weeks, Maisie called it, was
somehow built up round Mrs.
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