His laughter had dropped, and for a moment he turned his handsome serious face not to his hostess, but to his stepdaughter. "Well, it's rather more decent than some things. Upon my soul, the way things are going, it seems to me the only decency!" He had the air of arguing it out to Maisie, of presenting it, through an impulse of conscience, as a connexion in which they could honourably see her participate; though his plea of mere "decency" might well have appeared to fall below her rosy little vision. "If we're not good for YOU" he exclaimed, "I'll be hanged if I know who we shall be good for!"
Mrs. Beale showed the child an intenser light. "I dare say you WILL save us--from one thing and another."
"Oh I know what she'll save ME from!" Sir Claude roundly asserted. "There'll be rows of course," he went on.
Mrs. Beale quickly took him up. "Yes, but they'll be nothing--for you at least--to the rows your wife makes as it is. I can bear what _I_ suffer--I can't bear what you go through."
"We're doing a good deal for you, you know, young woman," Sir Claude went on to Maisie with the same gravity.
She coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire it should be remarked how little was lost on her. "Oh I know!"
"Then you must keep us all right!" This time he laughed.
"Handsome is that handsome does!" she returned in the same spirit. "You can take off your things," she went on, releasing Maisie.
The child, on her feet, was all emotion. "Then I'm just to stop--this way?"
"It will do as well as any other. Sir Claude, to-morrow, will have your things brought."
"I'll bring them myself. Upon my word I'll see them packed!" Sir Claude promised. "Come here and unbutton."
He had beckoned his young companion to where he sat, and he helped to disengage her from her coverings while Mrs. Beale, from a little distance, smiled at the hand he displayed. "There's a stepfather for you! I'm bound to say, you know, that he makes up for the want of other people."
"He makes up for the want of a nurse!" Sir Claude laughed. "Don't you remember I told you so the very first time?"
"Remember? It was exactly what made me think so well of you!"
"Nothing would induce me," the young man said to Maisie, "to tell you what made me think so well of HER." Having divested the child he kissed her gently and gave her a little pat to make her stand off. The pat was accompanied with a vague sigh in which his gravity of a moment before came back. "All the same, if you hadn't had the fatal gift of beauty--"