Beale!"
Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw
in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look,
as Susan Ash would have said, queer; and it was perhaps a part of the
queerness that he intensely smiled. "You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She
has great merits of her own."
Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude
had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while
into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that
resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things,
glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making
a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a
"thank-you" in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the
other side of the brim; so that, united by their grasp of this object,
they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time
Mrs. Wix had turned round. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that
you are going back?"
"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something
that touched her in the embarrassed, almost humiliated way their
companion's challenge made him turn it round and round. She had seen
people do that who, she was sure, did nothing else that Sir Claude did.
"I can't just say, my dear thing. We'll see about I--we'll talk of it
to-morrow. Meantime I must get some air."
Mrs. Wix, with her back to the window, threw up her head to a height
that, still for a moment, had the effect of detaining him.
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