and the vehicle was
already in motion. He stopped halfway; he stood there in the court
only seeing her go and noting that she gave him no other look. The way
he had put it to himself was that all quite MIGHT be at an end. Each
of her movements, in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced
that idea. Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted
there in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued
merely to look before him. It probably WAS all at an end.

Book Eleventh

[Note: In the 1909 New York Edition the following two chapters were
placed in the reverse of the order appearing below. Since 1950, most
scholars have agreed, because of the internal evidence of the two
chapters, that an editorial error caused them to be printed in reverse
order. This Etext, like other editions of the past four decades,
corrects the apparent error.--Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this
electronic text]

I

He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his
impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more
than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge.
Chad hadn't come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs,
apparently, at this juncture--as it occurred to Strether he so well
might have--that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for him
at the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only contribution offered
there was the fact that every one was out. It was with the idea that
he would have to come home to sleep that Strether went up to his rooms,
from which however he was still absent, though, from the balcony, a few
moments later, his visitor heard eleven o'clock strike. Chad's servant
had by this time answered for his reappearance; he HAD, the visitor
learned, come quickly in to dress for dinner and vanish again. Strether
spent an hour in waiting for him--an hour full of strange suggestions,
persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the
end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had counted.
The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his
disposal by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, the
novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like
the dagger in a contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft
circle--a circle which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer
still after the same Baptiste had remarked