Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had
already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began
for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"
"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her
spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.
"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked
stiffly backward. "He's there."
"And you've seen him?"
"No. He's there--he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with
a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so
that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each
other.
"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an
answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had
used was a flash of diplomacy--to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using
another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal,
strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of
a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have
been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie
herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a
simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had
ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she
slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a
little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into
clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.
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