de love to her."

Sir Claude looked at her harder, and it was clearly something in her
tone that made him quickly say: "You don't mind my asking you, do you?"

"Not at all; only I should think you'd know better than I."

"What Mrs. Beale did yesterday?"

She thought he coloured a trifle; but almost simultaneously with that
impression she found herself answering: "Yes--if you have seen her."

He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just
now I've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"

There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up
other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she enquired in a
moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"

He received her enquiry as he had received her doubt--with an
extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine of course why you
think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I
said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."

She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back garden at her
mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing--high, high,
high--that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally
broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook.
"Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"

"My going away again is just the point. I can't tell yet--it all
depends."

"On Mrs. Beale?" Maisie asked. "SHE won't go away." He finished emptying
his coffee-cup and then, when he had put it down, leaned back in his
chair, where she could see that he smiled on her. This only added to her
idea that he was in trouble, that he was turning somehow in his pain and
trying different things. He continued to smile and she went on: "Don't
you know that?"

"Yes, I may as well confess to you that as much as that I do know. SHE
won't go away. She'll stay."

"She'll stay. She'll stay," Maisie repeated.

"Just so. Won't you have some more coffee?"

"Yes, please."

"And another buttered roll?"

"Yes, please."

He signed to the hovering waiter, who arrived with the shining spout of
plenty in either hand and with the friendliest interest in mademoiselle.
_"Les tartines sont la."_ Their cups were replenished and, while he
watched almost musingly the bubbles in the fragrant mixture, "Just
so--just so," Sir Claude said again and again. "It's awfully awkward!"
he exclaimed when the waiter ha