Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/372

366 of her break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly at him as from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise; it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away, at any rate; she had distanced him—with rather a grand spring, an effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped halfway; he stood there in the court, only seeing her go and noting that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself was that all quite might be at an end. Each of her movements, in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, reinforced that idea. Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street, while, planted in the middle of his comparatively gray enclosure, he continued merely to look before him. It probably was all at an end.