Wix's effect of displacing her
and the visible stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a
double office and enlarged play for pacific powers.
These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before
Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the
pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally
made quite lurid by bursting in--it was near ten o'clock--with an object
held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at
least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after
the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr.
Farange--she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present
sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight
through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet that reached still
deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped
that impression in silence--a silence that had parted with half its veil
to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr.
Farange's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself
as a letter which he held up very high, so there was something in his
mere motion that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. "Here we are!" he cried
almost from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to
the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wix; he had pulled two papers
out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which was which.
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