warning as to the ravages he might be making in the girl's heart.
That would be the sort of way she would begin. And Edward
would have sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it;
that Maisie was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim
his wife had paid out of her own pocket. That would have been
enough to do the trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic
growing and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every
one of the public rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the lounge,
the schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they
wanted with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from
May till October. But there it was. And then Leonora ran--yes, she
ran up the stairs--to see if Maisie had not returned to her rooms.
She had determined to take that child right away from that hideous
place. It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I do not mean to say
that she was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora.
But the cold justice of the thing demanded that she should play
the part of mother to this child who had come from the same
convent. She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave
Edward to Florence and to me--and she would devote all her time
to providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she could
be returned to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late.

She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as
soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a
small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the
effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely
that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had
closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was