hink, more than anything else, the message I have here."

"You mean you've been afraid of it?"

"Well, I was doing my business in my own way. And I suppose your
present announcement," Strether went on, "isn't merely the result of
your sense of what I've expected. Otherwise you wouldn't have put me
in relation--" But he paused, pulling up.

At this Chad rose. "Ah HER wanting me not to go has nothing to do with
it! It's only because she's afraid--afraid of the way that, over there,
I may get caught. But her fear's groundless."

He had met again his companion's sufficiently searching look. "Are you
tired of her?"

Chad gave him in reply to this, with a movement of the head, the
strangest slow smile he had ever had from him. "Never."

It had immediately, on Strether's imagination, so deep and soft an
effect that our friend could only for the moment keep it before him.
"Never?"

"Never," Chad obligingly and serenely repeated.

It made his companion take several more steps. "Then YOU'RE not
afraid."

"Afraid to go?"

Strether pulled up again. "Afraid to stay."

The young man looked brightly amazed. "You want me now to 'stay'?"

"If I don't immediately sail the Pococks will immediately come out.
That's what I mean," said Strether, "by your mother's ultimatum ."

Chad showed a still livelier, but not an alarmed interest. "She has
turned on Sarah and Jim?"

Strether joined him for an instant in the vision. "Oh and you may be
sure Mamie. THAT'S whom she's turning on."

This also Chad saw--he laughed out. "Mamie--to corrupt me?"

"Ah," said Strether, "she's very charming."

"So you've already more than once told me. I should like to see her."

Something happy and easy, something above all unconscious, in the way
he said this, brought home again to his companion the facility of his
attitude and the enviability of his state. "See her then by all means.
And consider too," Strether went on, "that you really give your sister
a lift in letting her come to you. You give her a couple of months of
Paris, which she hasn't seen, if I'm not mistaken, since just after she
was married, and which I'm sure she wants but the pretext to visit."

Chad listened, but with all his own knowledge of the world. "She has
had it, the pretext, these several years, yet she has never taken it."

"Do you mean YOU?" Strether after an instant enquired.

"Certainly--the lone exile. And whom do you mean?" said Chad.

"Oh