Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/111

Then, somehow, it was brought fully to the child's knowledge that her stepmother had been making attempts to see her; that her mother had deeply resented it; that her stepfather had backed her stepmother up; that the latter had pretended to be acting as the representative of her father; and that her mother took the whole thing, in plain terms, very hard. The situation was, as Mrs. Wix declared, an extraordinary muddle to be sure. Her account of it brought back to Maisie the happy vision of the way Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale had made acquaintance—an incident to which, with her stepfather, though she had had little to say about it to Mrs. Wix, she had during the first weeks of her stay at her mother's found more than one opportunity to revert. As to what had taken place the day Sir Claude came for her, she had been vaguely grateful to Mrs. Wix for not attempting, as her mother had attempted, to put her through. This was what Sir Claude had called the process when he warned her of it and again, afterwards, when he told her she was an awfully good chap for having foiled it. Then it was that, well aware Mrs. Beale had n't in the least really given her up, she had asked him if he