me a little rat in private, and
I did not mind. But, if he called me it to her, I think he does not love
me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you knew the world and I knew nothing.
I thought it would be all right if you thought it could, and I thought
you would not have brought me if you did not, too. You should not have
done it, and we out of the same convent...."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she began a
search for Mrs Maidan herself--all over the hotel. The manager said that
Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up to the station to ask the
Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a plan for her immediate return
to Chitral. He imagined that he had seen her come back, but he was not
quite certain. No one in the large hotel had bothered his head about the
child. And she, wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down
beside a screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never
heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple. I
fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear
Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly warning as to the
ravages he might be making in the girl's heart. That would be the sort
of way she would begin. And Edward would have sentimentally assured her
that there was nothing in it; that Maisie was just a poor little rat
whose passage to Nauheim his wife had paid out of her own pocket. That
would have been enough to do the trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic growing
and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every one of
the public rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the lounge, the
schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they wanted with a
winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October. But
there it was. And then Leonora ran--yes, she ran up the stairs--to see
if Maisie had not returned to her rooms. She had determined to take that
child right away from that hideous place. It seemed to her to be all
unspeakable. I do not mean to say that she was not quite cool about it.
Leonora was always Leonora. But the cold justice of the thing demanded
that she should play the part of mother to this child who had come from
the same convent. She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave
Edward to Florence and to me--and she would devote all her time to
providing that child with an atmosp