Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/414

408 having "cut" him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that he wouldn't know it. He awaited them with a face from which he was conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their dinner and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a line to match. That, at least, was what darkened his vision for the moment. Afterwards, after they had bumped at the landing-place and he had assisted their getting ashore, everything found itself sponged over by the mere miracle of the encounter.

They could so much better, at last, on either side, treat it as a wild fable than as anything else, that the situation was made elastic by the amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed—apart from the oddity—the situation should have been really stiff, was a question naturally not practical at the moment, and, in fact, so far as we are concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that it was mainly he who had explained—as he had had, moreover, comparatively little difficulty in doing. He was to have, at all events, meanwhile, the worrying thought of their perhaps secretly suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such pains as might be to give it the semblance of an accident. That possibility—as their imputation—didn't, of course, bear looking into for an instant; yet the whole incident was so manifestly, arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could scarce keep disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to his lips. Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his presence was, practically, gross; and the narrowest escape any one of them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from so blundering. Nothing either like a challenge or like an apology was, so far as surface and sound were involved, even in question; surface and sound all made for their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they had, the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance, even more, that their little plans, their hours their train, in short,