It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from
a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her in the hall,
seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted
Beale Farange's door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers
to their missives took form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It
had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last
limits of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended
and that the duration of her visitor's hug was a direct reply to Miss
Overmore's veto. She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be
possible--that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under
protection of the fact that papa, always tormented in spite of arguments
with the idea of a school, had, for a three days' excursion to Brighton,
absolutely insisted on the attendance of her adversary. It was true that
when Maisie explained their absence and their important motive Mrs. Wix
wore an expression so peculiar that it could only have had its origin in
surprise. This contradiction indeed peeped out only to vanish, for at
the very moment that, in the spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon
her young friend a hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the
door and Miss Overmore bounded out. The shock of her encounter with Mrs.
Wix was less violent than Maisie had feared on seeing her and didn't
at all interfere with the sociable tone in which, under her rival's
eyes, she explained to her little charge that she had returned, for a
particular reason, a day sooner than she first intended. She had left
papa--in such nice lodgings--at Brighton; but he would come back to
his dear little home on the morrow. As for Mrs. Wix, papa's companion
supplied Maisie in later converse with the right word for the attitude
of this personage: Mrs. Wix "stood up" to her in a manner that the child
herself felt at the time to be astonishing. This occurred indeed after
Miss Overmore had so far raised her interdict as to make a move to the
dining-room, where, in the absence of any suggestion of sitting down,
it was scarcely more than natural that even poor Mrs. Wix should stand
up. Maisie at once enquired if at Brighton, this time, anything had
come of the possibility of a school; to which, much to her surprise,
Miss Overmore, who had always grandly repudiated it, replied after an
instant, but quite as if Mrs. Wix were not there:
"It may be, darling, that something WILL come. The objection, I must
tell you, has been quite removed."
At this it was still more startling to hear Mrs. Wix speak out with
great firmness. "I don't think, if you'll allow me to say so, that
there's any arrangement by which the objection CAN be 'removed.' What
has brought me here to-day is that I've a message for Maisie from dear
Mrs. Farange."