the image of the dreadful things it appeared to be prescribed to her to say. "Don't dream of it, my dear—I'll write; you may trust me!" cried Miss Overmore, who indeed wrote to such purpose that a hush in which you could have heard a pin drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix. She gave for weeks and weeks no sign whatever of life. It was as if she had been as effectually disposed of by Miss Overmore's communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road, had been disposed of by the terrible hansom. Her very silence became, after this, one of the largest elements of Maisie's consciousness; it proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further than she dared ever to mention to her companions. Somewhere in the depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of the troubled little current Mrs. Wix was intensely waiting.
VII
It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her
