ted, "stay here always. I wish
you could."

"By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He's not in
the least the case I supposed, he's quite another case. And it's as
such that he interests me." It was almost as if for his own
intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the
matter. "I don't want to give him up."

Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to be
light and tactful. "Up, you mean--a--to his mother?"

"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now. I'm thinking of the plan of
which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before him
as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in
complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been
happening to him. It took no account whatever of the impression I was
here on the spot immediately to begin to receive from him--impressions
of which I feel sure I'm far from having had the last."

Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your idea
is--more or less--to stay out of curiosity?"

"Call it what you like! I don't care what it's called--"

"So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the same,
immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it out will
be one of the sensations of my life. It IS clear you can toddle alone!"

He received this tribute without elation. "I shan't be alone when the
Pococks have come."

Her eyebrows went up. "The Pococks are coming?"

"That, I mean, is what will happen--and happen as quickly as
possible--in consequence of Chad's cable. They'll simply embark. Sarah
will come to speak for her mother--with an effect different from MY
muddle."

Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. "SHE then will take him back?"

"Very possibly--and we shall see. She must at any rate have the
chance, and she may be trusted to do all she can."

"And do you WANT that?"

"Of course," said Strether, "I want it. I want to play fair."

But she had lost for a moment the thread. "If it devolves on the
Pococks why do you stay?"

"Just to see that I DO play fair--and a little also, no doubt, that
they do." Strether was luminous as he had never been. "I came out to
find myself in presence of new facts--facts that have kept striking me
as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter's perfectly
simple. New reasons--reasons as new as the facts themselves--are
wanted; and of this our frien