" They scarce had time to wonder what this was before, as they
might have said, it flew straight into their face. "He's as free as I
am!"
"Yes, I know," said Maisie; as if, however, independently weighing the
value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of her stepmother's
treating it as news to HER, who had been the first person literally to
whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a few seconds, as if with the
sound of it in her ears, she stood with him again, in memory and in the
twilight, in the hotel garden at Folkestone.
Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the effect
of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that showed even
when she dropped--still quite impartially--almost to the confidential.
"Well, then--we've only to wait. He can't do without us long. I'm sure,
Mrs. Wix, he can't do without YOU! He's devoted to you; he has told me
so much about you. The extent I count on you, you know, count on you to
help me--" was an extent that even all her radiance couldn't express.
What it couldn't express quite as much as what it could made at any rate
every instant her presence and even her famous freedom loom larger; and
it was this mighty mass that once more led her companions, bewildered
and disjoined, to exchange with each other as through a thickening veil
confused and ineffectual signs. They clung together at least on the
common ground of unpreparedness, and Maisie watched without relief the
havoc of wonder in Mrs.
Pages:
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285