Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/236

thrust her into a hansom and got in after her, and then it was—as she drove along with him—that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and a toss of red plumage, Mrs. Cuddon had recognized them, ejaculated and vanished. There had been another moment at which she became aware of Sir Claude, also poised there in surprise, but out of her father's view, as if he had been warned off at the very moment of reaching them. It fell into its place with all the rest that she had heard Mrs. Beale say to her father, but whether low or loud was now lost to her, something about his having this time a new one; to which he had growled something indistinct, but apparently in the tone and of the sort that the child, from her earliest years, had associated with hearing somebody retort to somebody that somebody was "another." "Oh, I stick to the old!" Mrs. Beale had exclaimed at this, and her accent, even as the cab got away, was still in the air, for Maisie's companion had spoken no other word from the moment of whisking her off—none at least save the in-