e, as usual, with Waymarsh--they had
settled to that for thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about before
his friend came down.

He read his telegram in the court, standing still a long time where he
had opened it and giving five minutes afterwards to the renewed study
of it. At last, quickly, he crumpled it up as if to get it out of the
way; in spite of which, however, he kept it there--still kept it when,
at the end of another turn, he had dropped into a chair placed near a
small table. Here, with his scrap of paper compressed in his fist and
further concealed by his folding his arms tight, he sat for some time
in thought, gazed before him so straight that Waymarsh appeared and
approached him without catching his eye. The latter in fact, struck
with his appearance, looked at him hard for a single instant and then,
as if determined to that course by some special vividness in it,
dropped back into the salon de lecture without addressing him. But the
pilgrim from Milrose permitted himself still to observe the scene from
behind the clear glass plate of that retreat. Strether ended, as he
sat, by a fresh scrutiny of his compressed missive, which he smoothed
out carefully again as he placed it on his table. There it remained
for some minutes, until, at last looking up, he saw Waymarsh watching
him from within. It was on this that their eyes met--met for a moment
during which neither moved. But Strether then got up, folding his
telegram more carefully and putting it into his waistcoat pocket.

A few minutes later the friends were seated together at dinner; but
Strether had meanwhile said nothing about it, and they eventually
parted, after coffee in the court, with nothing said on either side.
Our friend had moreover the consciousness that even less than usual was
on this occasion said between them, so that it was almost as if each
had been waiting for something from the other. Waymarsh had always
more or less the air of sitting at the door of his tent, and silence,
after so many weeks, had come to play its part in their concert. This
note indeed, to Strether's sense, had lately taken a fuller tone, and
it was his fancy to-night that they had never quite so drawn it out.
Yet it befell, none the less that he closed the door to confidence when
his companion finally asked him if there were anything particular the
matter with him. "Nothing," he replied, "more than usual."

On the morrow, however, at an early hour,