Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/298

THE AMERICAN The Marquis stared. "Really, I've done nothing that I can boast of."

"Oh, don't be modest," Newman genially urged. "I can't flatter myself I'm doing so well—so well, that is, as I hope and pray—simply by my own merit. Please tell your mother too, won't you? how thoroughly I feel it." And, turning away with a sense of the fair thing done now, after all, all round, he left M. de Bellegarde looking after him more ambiguously than he knew.