o her as his sharpest for now getting away. If he
was to get away because of some of the relations involved in staying,
the cold attitude toward them might look pedantic in the light of
lingering on. He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must
go. The more he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt
himself make a subject of insistence of the latter. They were alike
intensely present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little cafe into
which he had dropped on quitting Maria's entresol. The rain that had
spoiled his evening with her was over; for it was still to him as if
his evening HAD been spoiled--though it mightn't have been wholly the
rain. It was late when he left the cafe, yet not too late; he couldn't
in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the
Boulevard Malesherbes--rather far round--on his way home. Present
enough always was the small circumstance that had originally pressed
for him the spring of so big a difference--the accident of little
Bilham's appearance on the balcony of the mystic troisieme at the
moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on his sense of what
was then before him. He recalled his watch, his wait, and the
recognition that had proceeded from the young stranger, that had played
frankly into the air and had presently brought him up--things smoothing
the way for his first straight step. He had since had occasion, a few
times, to pass the house without going in; but he had never passed it
without again feeling how it had then spoken to him. He stopped short
to-night on coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day were
oddly copying his first. The windows of Chad's apartment were open to
the balcony--a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and
taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he
could see leaned on the rail and looked down at him. It denoted
however no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined
itself in the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so that
Chad's was the attention that after he had stepped forward into the
street and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad's was the voice that,
sounding into the night with promptness and seemingly with joy, greeted
him and called him up.

That the young man had been visible there just in this position
expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported, he
had been absent and silent; and our friend drew br