Sir Claude looked at her harder, and it was clearly something in her tone that made him quickly say: "You don't mind my asking you, do you?"
"Not at all; only I should think you'd know better than I."
"What Mrs. Beale did yesterday?"
She thought he coloured a trifle; but almost simultaneously with that impression she found herself answering: "Yes—if you have seen her."
He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just now I've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"
There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she enquired in a moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"
He received her enquiry as he had received her doubt—with an extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine of course why you think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."
She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back garden at her mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing—high, high, high—that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook. "Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"
"My going away again is just the point. I can't tell yet—it all depends."
"On Mrs. Beale?" Maisie asked. "She won't go away." He finished emptying his coffee-cup and then, when he had put it down, leaned back in his chair, where she could see that he smiled on her. This only added to her idea that he was in trouble, that he was turning somehow in his pain and trying different things. He continued to smile and she went on: "Don't you know that?"