There was for an instant a silence that, under Sir Claude's influence and while he and Maisie looked at each other, suddenly pretended to be that of gravity. "We don't know Mr. Tischbein—do we, dear?"
Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "No—not Mr. Tischbein."
It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "You must excuse me, Sir Claude," she said with an austerity of which the note was real, "if I thank God to your face that he has in his mercy—I mean his mercy to our charge—allowed me to achieve this act." She gave out a long puff of pain. "It was time!" Then as if still more to point the moral: "I said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I stand to it: I did both of those things when I saw how even she, poor thing, saw. If you want the dots on the i's you shall have them. What she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I 'm just—" she quavered it out—"well, just clean! What she saw for her daughter was that there must at last be a decent person!"
Maisie was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not; the
