hour was over Maisie had elicited, in reply to her sharpest
challenge, a further account of her friend's long absence.

"Why I've broken my word to you so dreadfully--promising so solemnly and
then never coming? Well, my dear, that's a question that, not seeing me
day after day, you must very often have put to Mrs. Beale."

"Oh yes," the child replied; "again and again."

"And what has she told you?"

"That you're as bad as you're beautiful."

"Is that what she says?"

"Those very words."

"Ah the dear old soul!" Sir Claude was much diverted, and his loud,
clear laugh was all his explanation. Those were just the words Maisie
had last heard him use about Mrs. Wix. She clung to his hand, which was
encased in a pearl-grey glove ornamented with the thick black lines
that, at her mother's, always used to strike her as connected with the
way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows
well out, their umbrellas upside down. The mere sense of his grasp in
her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain.
His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she
couldn't see round its edges. He himself, however, remained showman of
the spectacle even after they had passed out of the Park and begun,
under the charm of the spot and the season, to stroll in Kensington
Gardens. What they had left behind them was, as he said, only a pretty
bad circus, and, through prepossessing gates and over a bridge, they
had come in a quarter of an hour, as he also remarked, a hundred miles
from London. A great green glade was before them, and high old trees,
and under the shade of these, in the fresh turf, the crooked course
of a rural footpath. "It's the Forest of Arden," Sir Claude had just
delightfully observed, "and I'm the banished duke, and you're--what was
the young woman called?--the artless country wench. And there," he went
on, "is the other girl--what's her name, Rosalind?--and (don't you
know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he IS making
up to her!"

His allusion was to a couple who, side by side, at the end of the glade,
were moving in the same direction as themselves. These distant figures,
in their slow stroll (which kept them so close together that their
heads, drooping a little forward, almost touched), presented the back of
a lady who looked tall, who was evidently a very fine woman, and that
of a gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed wel