Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/448

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was to delay no longer to re-establish communication with Chad, and he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention on hearing from her of the young man's absence. It was not, moreover, only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was the need of causing his conduct to square with another profession still—the motive he had described to 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 making a subject of insistence of the latter. They were alike intensely present to him as he sat in front of a quiet little café into which he had dropped on quitting Maria's entresol. The rain that had spoiled his evening with her had stopped; 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 café, yet not too late; he couldn't at all events go straight to bed, and he would walk round, rather far round, by the Boulevard Malesherbes 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 troisième at the moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on his curiosity. He recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition, on the young stranger's part, that had played so frankly into the air and had brought him up—things that had so smoothed the way for his first step. He had had occasion, a few times, to pass the house without going in; but had never passed it without again feeling how it had then spoken to him. He stopped short to-night, on coming at last to 442