She had clearly come straight from
her room, where Maisie in an instant guessed she had directed the
removal of her minor effects. "I don't leave you till I've given you
another chance. Will you come WITH me?"
Maisie turned to Sir Claude, who struck her as having been removed to a
distance of about a mile. To Mrs. Beale she turned no more than Mrs.
Beale had turned: she felt as if already their difference had been
disclosed. What had come out about that in the scene between the two
women? Enough came out now, at all events, as she put it practically to
her stepfather. "Will YOU come? Won't you?" she enquired as if she had
not already seen that she should have to give him up. It was the last
flare of her dream. By this time she was afraid of nothing.
"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs.
Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.
But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from
ME, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her
stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile
consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from
suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.
Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't
put it to her THAT way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's
tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in
which so many of her friends had been "compromised.
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