"From Maisie?" Mrs. Beale was much amused. "My reputation with Maisie is too good to suffer."
"But you believed me, you rascal, didn't you?" Sir Claude asked of the child.
She looked at him; she smiled. "Her reputation did suffer. I discovered you had been here."
He was not too chagrined to laugh. "The way, my dear, you talk of that sort of thing!"
"How should she talk," Mrs. Beale wanted to know, "after all this wretched time with her mother?"
"It was not mamma who told me," Maisie explained. "It was only Mrs. Wix." She was hesitating whether to bring out before Sir Claude the source of Mrs. Wix's information; but Mrs. Beale, addressing the young man, showed the vanity of scruples.
"Do you know that preposterous person came to see me a day or two ago?—when I told her I had seen you repeatedly."
Sir Claude, for once in a way, was disconcerted. "The old cat! She never told me. Then you thought I had lied?" he demanded of Maisie.
She was flurried by the term with which he had qualified her gentle friend, but she took the occasion for one to which she must in every manner lend herself. "Oh I didn't mind! But Mrs. Wix did," she added with an intention benevolent to her governess.
Her intention was not very effective as regards Mrs. Beale. "Mrs. Wix is too idiotic!" that lady declared.