ll 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."

This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she
took the hint. "No--it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way.
"Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and
wait there till I can come to you."

Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that
forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'M going,
but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"

Maisie surveyed--for the idea of a describable loss--the immensity of
space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost
everything."

Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you HAVE lost what we found
together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of
response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten
what we found together?"

Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"

"Your moral sense. HAVEN'T I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as
she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her
hand.

It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't
repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she
dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude
and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an
instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have
plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it
left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her
arms made a short jerk. What this jerk re