ompt. "No--not that."

"And he really doesn't want to himself?"

She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her face.
"He likes her too much."

Strether wondered. "To be willing to consider, you mean, the question
of taking her to America?"

"To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and
nice--really tender of her. We watch over her, and you must help us.
You must see her again."

Strether felt awkward. "Ah with pleasure--she's so remarkably
attractive."

The mother's eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was
to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace. "The dear thing
DID please you?" Then as he met it with the largest "Oh!" of
enthusiasm: "She's perfect. She's my joy."

"Well, I'm sure that--if one were near her and saw more of her--she'd
be mine."

"Then," said Madame de Vionnet, "tell Mrs. Newsome that!"

He wondered the more. "What good will that do you?" As she appeared
unable at once to say, however, he brought out something else. "Is
your daughter in love with our friend?"

"Ah," she rather startlingly answered, "I wish you'd find out!"

He showed his surprise. "I? A stranger?"

"Oh you won't be a stranger--presently. You shall see her quite, I
assure you, as if you weren't."

It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion. "It seems
to me surely that if her mother can't--"

"Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!" she rather inconsequently
broke in. But she checked herself with something she seemed to give
out as after all more to the point. "Tell her I've been good for him.
Don't you think I have?"

It had its effect on him--more than at the moment he quite measured.
Yet he was consciously enough touched. "Oh if it's all you--!"

"Well, it may not be 'all,'" she interrupted, "but it's to a great
extent. Really and truly," she added in a tone that was to take its
place with him among things remembered.

"Then it's very wonderful." He smiled at her from a face that he felt
as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so. At last she
also got up. "Well, don't you think that for that--"

"I ought to save you?" So it was that the way to meet her--and the
way, as well, in a manner, to get off--came over him. He heard himself
use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine
his flight. "I'll save you if I can."

II

In Chad's lovely home, however, one evening ten d