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 intensely waited.




VII


It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from
a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her in the hall,
seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted
Beale Farange's door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers
to their missives took form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It
had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last
limits of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended
and that the duration of her visitor's hug was a direct reply to Miss
Overmore's veto. She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be
possible--that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under
protection of the fact that papa, always tormented in spite of arguments
with the idea of a school, had, for a three days' excursion to Brighton,