cquainted with the neighbourhood,
had known what this particular retreat could offer them. The air quite
thickened, at their approach, with further intimations; the intimation
that they were expert, familiar, frequent--that this wouldn't at all
events be the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt--and
it made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment of the
impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to drift wide,
the oarsman letting it go. It had by this time none the less come
much nearer--near enough for Strether to dream the lady in the stern
had for some reason taken account of his being there to watch them. She
had remarked on it sharply, yet her companion hadn't turned round; it
was in fact almost as if our friend had felt her bid him keep still.
She had taken in something as a result of which their course had
wavered, and it continued to waver while they just stood off. This
little effect was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of
it was separate only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He
too had within the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the
lady whose parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a
pink point in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a
million, but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented
his back and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll,
who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other
than Chad.

Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in the
country--though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that their
country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the first at
recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock--for it
appeared to come to that--of their wonderful accident. Strether became
aware, with this, of what was taking place--that her recognition had
been even stranger for the pair in the boat, that her immediate impulse
had been to control it, and that she was quickly and intensely debating
with Chad the risk of betrayal. He saw they would show nothing if they
could feel sure he hadn't made them out; so that he had before him for
a few seconds his own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that
had popped up as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few
seconds to make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on
either side, TRYING the other side, and all fo