"To you, you abominable little horror?" that lady indignantly enquired, "and to this raving old demon who has filled your dreadful little mind with her wickedness? Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you did?"
"I love Sir Claude—I love him," Maisie replied with an awkward sense that she appeared to offer it as something that would do as well. Sir Claude had continued to pat her, and it was really an answer to his pats.
"She hates you—she hates you," he observed with the oddest quietness to Mrs. Beale.
His quietness made her blaze. "And you back her up in it and give me up to outrage?"
"No; I only insist that she's free—she's free."
Mrs. Beale stared—Mrs. Beale glared. "Free to starve with this pauper lunatic?"
"I'll do more for her than you ever did!" Mrs. Wix retorted. "I'll work my fingers to the bone."
Maisie, with Sir Claude's hands still on her shoulders, felt, just as she felt the fine surrender in them, that over her head he looked in a certain way at Mrs. Wix. "You needn't do that," she heard him say. "She has means."
"Means?—Maisie?" Mrs. Beale shrieked. "Means that her vile father has stolen!"
"I'll get them back—I'll get them back. I'll look into it." He smiled and nodded at Mrs. Wix.