Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/232

The place was full of sideshows, to which Mrs. Beale could introduce the little girl only, alas! by revealing to her so attractive, so enthralling a name: the sideshows, each time, were sixpence apiece, and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences. Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more slowly the great painted posters, pressing, with a linked arm, closer to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the sensible stir of a shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning: if Sir Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to flow. The companions paused, for want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a large presentment of bright brown ladies—they were brown all over—in a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance, and there Maisie dolorously expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not been promised as a certainty—a remark that caused the child to gaze at the Flowers of the Forest