Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/269

sovereigns were examined with some attention, the result of which, however, was to make Mrs. Beale desire to know what, if one really went into the matter, they could be called but the wages of sin. Her companion went into it merely to the point of inquiring what then they were to do with them; on which Mrs. Beale, who had by that time put them into her pocket, replied with dignity and with her hand on the place: "We 're to send them back on the spot!" Susan, the child soon afterwards learnt, had been invited to contribute to this act of restitution her one appropriated coin; but a closer clutch of the treasure showed in her private assurance to Maisie that there was a limit to the way she could be "done." Maisie had been open with Mrs. Beale about the whole of last night's transaction; but she now found herself, on the part of their indignant inferior, a recipient of remarks that she must feel to be scaring secrets. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour—it was three in the morning, if she really wanted to know—at which Mrs. Beale had re-entered the house; another, in accents as to which Maisie's criticism was still intensely tacit, characterized that lady's appeal as such a