t have been made out, just escaped changing
colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional
serenity. It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with
duplicity: "And you're going--?"

"You almost deserve it when you abandon me so."

She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. "My absence
has helped you--as I've only to look at you to see. It was my
calculation, and I'm justified. You're not where you were. And the
thing," she smiled, "was for me not to be there either. You can go of
yourself."

"Oh but I feel to-day," he comfortably declared, "that I shall want you
yet."

She took him all in again. "Well, I promise you not again to leave
you, but it will only be to follow you. You've got your momentum and
can toddle alone."

He intelligently accepted it. "Yes--I suppose I can toddle. It's the
sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear it--the way
I strike him as going--no longer. That's only the climax of his
original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written to
Woollett that I'm in peril of perdition."

"Ah good!" she murmured. "But is it only your supposition?"

"I make it out--it explains."

"Then he denies?--or you haven't asked him?"

"I've not had time," Strether said; "I made it out but last night,
putting various things together, and I've not been since then face to
face with him."

She wondered. "Because you're too disgusted? You can't trust
yourself?"

He settled his glasses on his nose. "Do I look in a great rage?"

"You look divine!"

"There's nothing," he went on, "to be angry about. He has done me on
the contrary a service."

She made it out. "By bringing things to a head?"

"How well you understand!" he almost groaned. "Waymarsh won't in the
least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or extenuate. He
has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience and
after wakeful nights. He'll recognise that he's fully responsible, and
will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any
discussion we may have will bring us quite together again--bridge the
dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at
last, in the consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk
about."

She was silent a little. "How wonderfully you take it! But you're
always wonderful."

He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate
spirit, a comple