had been controlled—Mrs. Wix perhaps in especial—by delicacy and even by embarrassment. The end of her colloquy with her stepfather in the schoolroom was her saying,—
"Then if we 're not to see Mrs. Beale at all, it is n't what she seemed to think when you came for me."
He looked rather blank. "What did she seem to think?"
"Why, that I 've brought you together."
"She thought that?" Sir Claude inquired.
Maisie was surprised at his already forgetting it. "Just as I brought papa and her. Don't you remember she said so?"
It came back to Sir Claude in a peal of laughter. "Oh, yes—she said so!"
"And you said so," Maisie lucidly pursued.
He recovered with increasing mirth the whole occasion. "And you said so!" he retorted as if they were playing a game.
"Then were we all mistaken?" the child asked.
He considered a little. "No; on the whole not. I dare say it 's just what you have done. We are together—in an extraordinary sort of way. She 's thinking of us, of you and me, though we don't meet. And
