"Oh three or four days."
It took her breath away. "You can save money in that time?"
He burst out laughing, starting to walk again and taking her under his arm. He confessed to her on the way that she too had put a finger on the weakest of all his weaknesses, the fact, of which he was perfectly aware, that he probably might have lived within his means if he had never done anything for thrift. "It's the happy thoughts that do it," he said; "there's nothing so ruinous as putting in a cheap week." Maisie heard afresh among the pleasant sounds of the closing day that steel click of Ida's change of mind. She thought of the ten-pound note it would have been delightful at this juncture to produce for her companion's encouragement. But the idea was dissipated by his saying irrelevantly, in presence of the next thing they stopped to admire: "We shall stay till she arrives."
She turned upon him. "Mrs. Beale?"
"Mrs. Wix. I've had a wire," he went on. "She has seen your mother."
"Seen mamma?" Maisie stared. "Where in the world?"
"Apparently in London. They've been together."
For an instant this looked ominous—a fear came into her eyes. "Then she hasn't gone?"
"Your mother?—to South Africa? I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude said; and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood there and with a kind of absent gaze—absent, that is, from her affairs—followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. "But I dare say it's all right. She wouldn't come if it wasn't, poor old thing: she knows rather well what she's about."
This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it fit into her dream. "Well, what is she about?"