Her sleep was drawn out, she instantly recognised lateness in the way
her eyes opened to Mrs. Wix, erect, completely dressed, more dressed
than ever, and gazing at her from the centre of the room. The next thing
she was sitting straight up, wide awake with the fear of the hours of
"abroad" that she might have lost. Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had
already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began
for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"
"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her
spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.
"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked
stiffly backward. "He's there."
"And you've seen him?"
"No. He's there--he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with
a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so
that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each
other.
"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an
answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had
used was a flash of diplomacy--to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using
another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal,
strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of
a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have
been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie
herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a
simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had
ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she
slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a
little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into
clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.
Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had
together a _café complet_ in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side
had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the
precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her
with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied
in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing
even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for
the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent
insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any
it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had
now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was
still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of
dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily
was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there--he's there!" she
had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation
to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so
rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her
only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not
having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently
being found in the salon.
"He's there--he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the
child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."
"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.
"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she
reiterated.
"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.