have
seen for yourself that there's nothing I'm afraid of now. Let me go to
her--I'LL settle her and I'll take that woman back without a hair of
her touched. Let me put in the two or three days--let me wind up the
connexion. You stay here with Maisie, with the carriage and the larks
and the luxury; then I'll return to you and we'll go off together--we'll
live together without a cloud. Take me, take me," she went on and
on--the tide of her eloquence was high. "Here I am; I know what I am
and what I ain't; but I say boldly to the face of you both that I'll do
better for you, far, than ever she'll even try to. I say it to yours,
Sir Claude, even though I owe you the very dress on my back and the very
shoes on my feet. I owe you everything--that's just the reason; and to
pay it back, in profusion, what can that be but what I want? Here I am,
here I am!"--she spread herself into an exhibition that, combined with
her intensity and her decorations, appeared to suggest her for strange
offices and devotions, for ridiculous replacements and substitutions.
She manipulated her gown as she talked, she insisted on the items of
her debt. "I have nothing of my own, I know--no money, no clothes, no
appearance, no anything, nothing but my hold of this little one truth,
which is all in the world I can bribe you with: that the pair of you are
more to me than all besides, and that if you'll let me help you and save
you, make what you both want possible in the one way it CAN be, why,
I'll work myself to the bone in your service!"

Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent appeal;
he plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation and pain. He
addressed himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters until he
met again, as he so frequently and actively met it, the more than filial
gaze of his intelligent little charge. That gave him--poor plastic and
dependent male--his issue. If she was still a child she was yet of
the sex that could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed
invitation to an embrace. She freshly sprang to him and again they
inaudibly conversed. "Be nice to her, be nice to her," he at last
distinctly articulated; "be nice to her as you've not even been to ME!"
On which, without another look at Mrs. Wix, he somehow got out of the
room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of these words as well
as of the idea that he had unmistakeably once more dodged.

XXV

Every single