clothes on the hooks, and that there was a strained silence--a
silence, she said, as if there were something in the room that
drank up such sounds as there were. She had to fight against that
feeling, whilst she read the postscript of the letter.

"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript
began. The poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right
of you and I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me
a poor little rat to the American lady. He always called me a little
rat in private, and I did not mind. But, if he called me it to her, I
think he does not love me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you
knew the world and I knew nothing. I thought it would be all right
if you thought it could, and I thought you would not have brought
me if you did not, too. You should not have done it, and we out of
the same convent. . . ."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she
began a search for Mrs Maidan herself--all over the hotel. The
manager said that Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up
to the station to ask the Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a
plan for her immediate return to Chitral. He imagined that he had
seen her come back, but he was not quite certain. No one in the
large hotel had bothered his head about the child. And she,
wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down beside a
screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never
heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple.
I fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor
dear Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly