VOLUME II - BOOK SEVEN - CHAPTER I

It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim

church--still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so

far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his

nerves. He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there

with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had

found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession

of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had

not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the

moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly. He was

conscious enough that it was only for the moment, but good moments--

if he could call them good--still had their value for a man who by

this time struck himself as living almost disgracefully from hand

to mouth. Having so well learnt the way, he had lately made the

pilgrimage more than once by himself--had quite stolen off, taking

an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the

adventure when restored to his friends.

His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as

remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey

hadn't come back. She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he

must judge her grossly inconsequent--perhaps in fact for the time

odiously faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred

sentence, throwing herself in short on his generosity. For her too,

she could assure him, life was complicated--more complicated than

he could have guessed; she had moreover made certain of him--

certain of not wholly missing him on her return--before her

disappearance. If furthermore she didn't burden him with letters it

was frankly because of her sense of the other great commerce he had

to carry on. He himself, at the end of a fortnight, had written

twice, to show how his generosity could be trusted; but he reminded

himself in each case of Mrs. Newsome's epistolary manner at the

times when Mrs. Newsome kept off delicate ground. He sank his

problem, he talked of Waymarsh and Miss Barrace, of little Bilham

and the set over the river, with whom he had again had tea, and he

was easy, for convenience, about Chad and Madame de Vionnet and

Jeanne. He admitted that he continued to see them, he was decidedly

so confirmed a haunter of Chad's premises and that young man's

practical intimacy with them was so undeniably great; but he had

his reason for not attempting to render for Miss Gostrey's benefit

the impression of these last days. That would be to tell her too

much about himself--it being at present just from himself he was

trying to escape.

This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same

impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse

to let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at

least to pass. He was aware of having no errand in such a place but

the desire not to be, for the hour, in certain other places; a

sense of safety, of simplification, which each time he yielded to

it he amused himself by thinking of as a private concession to

cowardice. The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct

voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to

sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn't elsewhere,

that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned. He

was tired, but he wasn't plain--that was the pity and the trouble

of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the door very

much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on the

threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He

trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before

the cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid

upon him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of

a museum--which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the

afternoon of life, he would have liked to be free to be. This form

of sacrifice did at any rate for the occasion as well as another;

it made him quite sufficiently understand how, within the precinct,

for the real refugee, the things of the world could fall into

abeyance. That was the cowardice, probably--to dodge them, to beg

the question, not to deal with it in the hard outer light; but his

own oblivions were too brief, too vain, to hurt any one but

himself, and he had a vague and fanciful kindness for certain

persons whom he met, figures of mystery and anxiety, and whom, with

observation for his pastime, he ranked as those who were fleeing

from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice

too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long

aisles and the brightness of the many altars.

Thus it was at all events that, one morning some dozen days after

the dinner in the Boulevard Malesherbes at which Madame de Vionnet

had been present with her daughter, he was called upon to play his

part in an encounter that deeply stirred his imagination. He had

the habit, in these contemplations, of watching a fellow visitant,

here and there, from a respectable distance, remarking some note of

behaviour, of penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved

state; this was the manner in which his vague tenderness took its

course, the degree of demonstration to which it naturally had to

confine itself. It hadn't indeed so felt its responsibility as when

on this occasion he suddenly measured the suggestive effect of a

lady whose supreme stillness, in the shade of one of the chapels,

he had two or three times noticed as he made, and made once more,

his slow circuit. She wasn't prostrate--not in any degree bowed,

but she was strangely fixed, and her prolonged immobility showed

her, while he passed and paused, as wholly given up to the need,

whatever it was, that had brought her there. She only sat and gazed

before her, as he himself often sat; but she had placed herself, as

he never did, within the focus of the shrine, and she had lost

herself, he could easily see, as he would only have liked to do.

She was not a wandering alien, keeping back more than she gave, but

one of the familiar, the intimate, the fortunate, for whom these

dealings had a method and a meaning. She reminded our friend--since

it was the way of nine tenths of his current impressions to act as

recalls of things imagined--of some fine firm concentrated heroine

of an old story, something he had heard, read, something that, had

he had a hand for drama, he might himself have written, renewing

her courage, renewing her clearness, in splendidly-protected

meditation. Her back, as she sat, was turned to him, but his

impression absolutely required that she should be young and

interesting, and she carried her head moreover, even in the sacred

shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a kind of implied

conviction of consistency, security, impunity. But what had such a

woman come for if she hadn't come to pray? Strether's reading of

such matters was, it must be owned, confused; but he wondered if

her attitude were some congruous fruit of absolution, of

"indulgence." He knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place,

might mean; yet he had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it

might indeed add to the zest of active rites. All this was a good

deal to have been denoted by a mere lurking figure who was nothing

to him; but, the last thing before leaving the church, he had the

surprise of a still deeper quickening.

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the

museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft,

to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms

of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once

in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes,

a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman,

at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he

played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in

reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the

question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge

would be able to enter. Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be

perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett

as the fruit of his mission? It was a possibility that held him a

minute--held him till he happened to feel that some one, unnoticed,

had approached him and paused. Turning, he saw that a lady stood

there as for a greeting, and he sprang up as he next took her,

securely, for Madame de Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised

him as she passed near him on her way to the door. She checked,

quickly and gaily, a certain confusion in him, came to meet it,

turned it back, by an art of her own; the confusion having

threatened him as he knew her for the person he had lately been

observing. She was the lurking figure of the dim chapel; she had

occupied him more than she guessed; but it came to him in time,

luckily, that he needn't tell her and that no harm, after all, had

been done. She herself, for that matter, straightway showing she

felt their encounter as the happiest of accidents, had for him a

"You come here too?" that despoiled surprise of every awkwardness.

"I come often," she said. "I love this place, but I'm terrible, in

general, for churches. The old women who live in them all know me;

in fact I'm already myself one of the old women. It's like that, at

all events, that I foresee I shall end." Looking about for a chair,

so that he instantly pulled one nearer, she sat down with him again

to the sound of an "Oh, I like so much your also being fond--!"

He confessed the extent of his feeling, though she left the object

vague; and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her vagueness,

which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful things.

He was conscious of how much it was affected, this sense, by

something subdued and discreet in the way she had arranged herself

for her special object and her morning walk--he believed her to

have come on foot; the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn--a

mere touch, but everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in

which, here and there, a dull wine-colour seemed to gleam faintly

through black; the charming discretion of her small compact head;

the quiet note, as she sat, of her folded, grey-gloved hands. It

was, to Strether's mind, as if she sat on her own ground, the light

honours of which, at an open gate, she thus easily did him, while

all the vastness and mystery of the domain stretched off behind.

When people were so completely in possession they could be

extraordinarily civil; and our friend had indeed at this hour a

kind of revelation of her heritage. She was romantic for him far

beyond what she could have guessed, and again he found his small

comfort in the conviction that, subtle though she was, his

impression must remain a secret from her. The thing that, once

more, made him uneasy for secrets in general was this particular

patience she could have with his own want of colour; albeit that on

the other hand his uneasiness pretty well dropped after he had been

for ten minutes as colourless as possible and at the same time as

responsive.

The moments had already, for that matter, drawn their deepest tinge

from the special interest excited in him by his vision of his

companion's identity with the person whose attitude before the

glimmering altar had so impressed him. This attitude fitted

admirably into the stand he had privately taken about her connexion

with Chad on the last occasion of his seeing them together. It

helped him to stick fast at the point he had then reached; it was

there he had resolved that he WOULD stick, and at no moment since

had it seemed as easy to do so. Unassailably innocent was a

relation that could make one of the parties to it so carry herself.

If it wasn't innocent why did she haunt the churches?--into which,

given the woman he could believe he made out, she would never have

come to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted them for

continued help, for strength, for peace--sublime support which, if

one were able to look at it so, she found from day to day. They

talked, in low easy tones and with lifted lingering looks, about

the great monument and its history and its beauty--all of which,

Madame de Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the

outer view. "We'll presently, after we go," she said, "walk round

it again if you like. I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be

pleasant to look at it well with you." He had spoken of the great

romancer and the great romance, and of what, to his imagination,

they had done for the whole, mentioning to her moreover the

exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy blazing volumes that were

so out of proportion.

"Out of proportion to what?"

"Well, to any other plunge." Yet he felt even as he spoke how at

that instant he was plunging. He had made up his mind and was

impatient to get into the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be

uttered outside, and he had a fear that it might with delay still

slip away from him. She however took her time; she drew out their

quiet gossip as if she had wished to profit by their meeting, and

this confirmed precisely an interpretation of her manner, of her

mystery. While she rose, as he would have called it, to the

question of Victor Hugo, her voice itself, the light low quaver of

her deference to the solemnity about them, seemed to make her words

mean something that they didn't mean openly. Help, strength, peace,

a sublime support--she hadn't found so much of these things as that

the amount wouldn't be sensibly greater for any scrap his

appearance of faith in her might enable her to feel in her hand.

Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to

affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn't jerk

himself out of her reach. People in difficulties held on by what

was nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than

sources of comfort more abstract. It was as to this he had made up

his mind; he had made it up, that is, to give her a sign. The sign

would be that--though it was her own affair--he understood; the

sign would be that--though it was her own affair--she was free to

clutch. Since she took him for a firm object--much as he might to

his own sense appear at times to rock--he would do his best to BE one.

The end of it was that half an hour later they were seated together

for an early luncheon at a wonderful, a delightful house of

entertainment on the left bank--a place of pilgrimage for the

knowing, they were both aware, the knowing who came, for its great

renown, the homage of restless days, from the other end of the

town. Strether had already been there three times--first with Miss

Gostrey, then with Chad, then with Chad again and with Waymarsh and

little Bilham, all of whom he had himself sagaciously entertained;

and his pleasure was deep now on learning that Madame de Vionnet

hadn't yet been initiated. When he had said as they strolled round

the church, by the river, acting at last on what, within, he had

made up his mind to, "Will you, if you have time, come to dejeuner

with me somewhere? For instance, if you know it, over there on the

other side, which is so easy a walk"--and then had named the

place; when he had done this she stopped short as for quick

intensity, and yet deep difficulty, of response. She took in the

proposal as if it were almost too charming to be true; and there

had perhaps never yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment

of pride--so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding

himself thus able to offer to a person in such universal possession

a new, a rare amusement. She had heard of the happy spot, but she

asked him in reply to a further question how in the world he could

suppose her to have been there. He supposed himself to have

supposed that Chad might have taken her, and she guessed this the

next moment to his no small discomfort.

"Ah, let me explain," she smiled, "that I don't go about with him

in public; I never have such chances--not having them otherwise--

and it's just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature living in

my hole, I adore." It was more than kind of him to have thought of

it--though, frankly, if he asked whether she had time she hadn't a

single minute. That however made no difference--she'd throw

everything over. Every duty at home, domestic, maternal, social,

awaited her; but it was a case for a high line. Her affairs would

go to smash, but hadn't one a right to one's snatch of scandal when

one was prepared to pay? It was on this pleasant basis of costly

disorder, consequently, that they eventually seated themselves, on

either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay

and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where, for an hour, in the

matter of letting himself go, of diving deep, Strether was to feel

he had touched bottom. He was to feel many things on this occasion,

and one of the first of them was that he had travelled far since

that evening in London, before the theatre, when his dinner with

Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had struck him as

requiring so many explanations. He had at that time gathered them

in, the explanations--he had stored them up; but it was at present

as if he had either soared above or sunk below them--he couldn't

tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn't seem to

leave the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than

lucidity. How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one,

that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the

bright clean ordered water-side life came in at the open window?--

the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely

white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of

straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the

smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of their

talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early

summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face

and their human questions.

Their human questions became many before they had done--many more,

as one after the other came up, than our friend's free fancy had at

all foreseen. The sense he had had before, the sense he had had

repeatedly, the sense that the situation was running away with him,

had never been so sharp as now; and all the more that he could

perfectly put his finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its

teeth. That accident had definitely occurred, the other evening,

after Chad's dinner; it had occurred, as he fully knew, at the

moment when he interposed between this lady and her child, when he

suffered himself so to discuss with her a matter closely concerning

them that her own subtlety, marked by its significant "Thank you!"

instantly sealed the occasion in her favour. Again he had held off

for ten days, but the situation had continued out of hand in spite

of that; the fact that it was running so fast being indeed just WHY

he had held off. What had come over him as he recognised her in the

nave of the church was that holding off could be but a losing game

from the instant she was worked for not only by her subtlety, but

by the hand of fate itself. If all the accidents were to fight on

her side--and by the actual showing they loomed large--he could

only give himself up. This was what he had done in privately

deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast with him.

What did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash

in which a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their walk,

their dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view,

their present talk and his present pleasure in it--to say nothing,

wonder of wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less,

accordingly, was his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted

up at least the folly of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for

his memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their

glasses, in the hum of the town and the plash of the river. It WAS

clearly better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb. One might as

well perish by the sword as by famine.

"Maria's still away?"--that was the first thing she had asked him;

and when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in

spite of the meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey's

absence, she had gone on to enquire if he didn't tremendously miss

her. There were reasons that made him by no means sure, yet he

nevertheless answered "Tremendously"; which she took in as if it

were all she had wished to prove. Then, "A man in trouble MUST be

possessed somehow of a woman," she said; "if she doesn't come in

one way she comes in another."

"Why do you call me a man in trouble?"

"Ah because that's the way you strike me." She spoke ever so gently

and as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of

his bounty. "AREn't you in trouble?"

He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated that--hated

to pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad's

lady, in respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of

indifference--was he already at that point? Perversely, none the

less, his pause gave a strange air of truth to her supposition; and

what was he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just in

the way he had most dreamed of not doing? "I'm not in trouble yet,"

he at last smiled. "I'm not in trouble now."

"Well, I'm always so. But that you sufficiently know." She was a

woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows

on the table. It was a posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was

easy for a femme du monde. "Yes--I am 'now'!"

"There was a question you put to me," he presently returned, "the

night of Chad's dinner. I didn't answer it then, and it has been

very handsome of you not to have sought an occasion for pressing me

about it since."

She was instantly all there. "Of course I know what you allude to.

I asked you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to see

me, just before you left me, that you'd save me. And you then said

--at our friend's--that you'd have really to wait to see, for

yourself, what you did mean."

"Yes, I asked for time," said Strether. "And it sounds now, as you

put it, like a very ridiculous speech."

"Oh!" she murmured--she was full of attenuation. But she had

another thought. "If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that

you're in trouble?"

"Ah if I were," he replied, "it wouldn't be the trouble of fearing

ridicule. I don't fear it."

"What then do you?"

"Nothing--now." And he leaned back in his chair.

"I like your 'now'!" she laughed across at him.

"Well, it's precisely that it fully comes to me at present that

I've kept you long enough. I know by this time, at any rate, what I

meant by my speech; and I really knew it the night of Chad's

dinner."

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it was difficult at the moment. I had already at that

moment done something for you, in the sense of what I had said the

day I went to see you; but I wasn't then sure of the importance I

might represent this as having."

She was all eagerness. "And you're sure now?"

"Yes; I see that, practically, I've done for you--had done for you

when you put me your question--all that it's as yet possible to me

to do. I feel now," he went on, "that it may go further than I

thought. What I did after my visit to you," he explained, "was to

write straight off to Mrs. Newsome about you, and I'm at last, from

one day to the other, expecting her answer. It's this answer that

will represent, as I believe, the consequences."

Patient and beautiful was her interest. "I see--the consequences of

your speaking for me." And she waited as if not to hustle him.

He acknowledged it by immediately going on. "The question, you

understand, was HOW I should save you. Well, I'm trying it by thus

letting her know that I consider you worth saving."

"I see--I see." Her eagerness broke through.

"How can I thank you enough?" He couldn't tell her that, however,

and she quickly pursued. "You do really, for yourself, consider

it?"

His only answer at first was to help her to the dish that had been

freshly put before them. "I've written to her again since then--

I've left her in no doubt of what I think. I've told her all about

you."

"Thanks--not so much. 'All about' me," she went on--"yes."

"All it seems to me you've done for him."

"Ah and you might have added all it seems to ME!" She laughed

again, while she took up her knife and fork, as in the cheer of

these assurances. "But you're not sure how she'll take it."

"No, I'll not pretend I'm sure."

"Voila." And she waited a moment. "I wish you'd tell me about her."

"Oh," said Strether with a slightly strained smile, "all that

need concern you about her is that she's really a grand person."

Madame de Vionnet seemed to demur. "Is that all that need concern

me about her?"

But Strether neglected the question. "Hasn't Chad talked to you?"

"Of his mother? Yes, a great deal--immensely. But not from your

point of view."

"He can't," our friend returned, "have said any ill of her."

"Not the least bit. He has given me, like you, the assurance that

she's really grand. But her being really grand is somehow just what

hasn't seemed to simplify our case. Nothing," she continued, "is

further from me than to wish to say a word against her; but of

course I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me

anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another

woman."

This was a proposition Strether couldn't contradict. "And yet what

other way could I have expressed to her what I felt? It's what

there was most to say about you."

"Do you mean then that she WILL be good to me?"

"It's what I'm waiting to see. But I've little doubt she would," he

added, "if she could comfortably see you."

It seemed to strike her as a happy, a beneficent thought. "Oh then

couldn't that be managed? Wouldn't she come out? Wouldn't she if

you so put it to her? DID you by any possibility?" she faintly

quavered.

"Oh no"--he was prompt. "Not that. It would be, much more, to give

an account of you that--since there's no question of YOUR paying

the visit--I should go home first."

It instantly made her graver. "And are you thinking of that?"

"Oh all the while, naturally."

"Stay with us--stay with us!" she exclaimed on this. "That's your

only way to make sure."

"To make sure of what?"

"Why that he doesn't break up. You didn't come out to do that to

him."

"Doesn't it depend," Strether returned after a moment, "on what you

mean by breaking up?"

"Oh you know well enough what I mean!"

His silence seemed again for a little to denote an understanding.

"You take for granted remarkable things."

"Yes, I do--to the extent that I don't take for granted vulgar

ones. You're perfectly capable of seeing that what you came out for

wasn't really at all to do what you'd now have to do."

"Ah it's perfectly simple," Strether good-humouredly pleaded. "I've

had but one thing to do--to put our case before him. To put it as

it could only be put here on the spot--by personal pressure. My

dear lady," he lucidly pursued, "my work, you see, is really done,

and my reasons for staying on even another day are none of the

best. Chad's in possession of our case and professes to do it full

justice. What remains is with himself. I've had my rest, my

amusement and refreshment; I've had, as we say at Woollett, a

lovely time. Nothing in it has been more lovely than this happy

meeting with you--in these fantastic conditions to which you've so

delightfully consented. I've a sense of success. It's what I

wanted. My getting all this good is what Chad has waited for, and I

gather that if I'm ready to go he's the same."

She shook her head with a finer deeper wisdom. "You're not ready.

If you're ready why did you write to Mrs. Newsome in the sense

you've mentioned to me?"

Strether considered. "I shan't go before I hear from her. You're

too much afraid of her," he added.

It produced between them a long look from which neither shrank. "I

don't think you believe that--believe I've not really reason to

fear her."

"She's capable of great generosity," Strether presently stated.

"Well then let her trust me a little. That's all I ask. Let her

recognise in spite of everything what I've done."

"Ah remember," our friend replied, "that she can't effectually

recognise it without seeing it for herself. Let Chad go over and

show her what you've done, and let him plead with her there for it

and, as it were, for YOU."

She measured the depth of this suggestion. "Do you give me your

word of honour that if she once has him there she won't do her best

to marry him?"

It made her companion, this enquiry, look again a while out at the

view; after which he spoke without sharpness. "When she sees for

herself what he is--"

But she had already broken in. "It's when she sees for herself what

he is that she'll want to marry him most."

Strether's attitude, that of due deference to what she said,

permitted him to attend for a minute to his luncheon. "I doubt if

that will come off. It won't be easy to make it."

"It will be easy if he remains there--and he'll remain for the

money. The money appears to be, as a probability, so hideously

much."

"Well," Strether presently concluded, "nothing COULD really hurt

you but his marrying."

She gave a strange light laugh. "Putting aside what may really hurt

HIM."

But her friend looked at her as if he had thought of that too.

"The question will come up, of course, of the future that you

yourself offer him."

She was leaning back now, but she fully faced him. "Well, let it

come up!"

"The point is that it's for Chad to make of it what he can. His

being proof against marriage will show what he does make."

"If he IS proof, yes"--she accepted the proposition. "But for

myself," she added, "the question is what YOU make."

"Ah I make nothing. It's not my affair."

"I beg your pardon. It's just there that, since you've taken it up

and are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours. You're

not saving me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your

interest in our friend. The one's at any rate wholly dependent on

the other. You can't in honour not see me through," she wound up,

"because you can't in honour not see HIM."

Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The thing

that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious. She had

none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact,

it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head. Mrs. Newsome,

goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this. He took it

all in, he saw it all together. "No," he mused, "I can't in honour

not see him."

Her face affected him as with an exquisite light. "You WILL then?"

"I will."

At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her

feet. "Thank you!" she said with her hand held out to him across

the table and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had

so particularly given them after Chad's dinner. The golden nail she

had then driven in pierced a good inch deeper. Yet he reflected

that he himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his mind to

on the same occasion. So far as the essence of the matter went he had

simply stood fast on the spot on which he had then planted his feet.

Read next: VOLUME II#BOOK SEVEN#CHAPTER II

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK SIXTH#CHAPTER III

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