four minutes, and the author of it had soon explained that, as Madame de Vionnet was immediately going “on,” this could be for Jeanne but a snatch. They would all meet again soon, and Strether was meanwhile to stay and amuse himself—“I’ll pick you up again in plenty of time.” He took the girl off as he had brought her, and Strether, with the faint sweet foreignness of her “Au revoir, monsieur!” in his ears as a note almost unprecedented, watched them recede side by side and felt how, once more, her companion’s relation to her got an accent from it. They disappeared among the others and apparently into the house; whereupon our friend turned round to give out to little Bilham the conviction of which he was full. But there was no little Bilham any more; little Bilham had within the few moments, for reasons of his own, proceeded further: a circumstance by which, in its order, Strether was also sensibly affected. III Chad was not in fact on this occasion to keep his promise of coming back; but Miss Gostrey had soon presented herself with an explanation of his failure. There had been reasons at the last for his going off with _ces dames_; and he had asked her with much instance to come out and take charge of their friend. She did so, Strether felt as she took her place beside him, in a manner that left nothing to desire. He had dropped back on his bench, alone again for a time, and the more conscious for little Bilham’s defection of his unexpressed thought; in respect to which however this next converser was a still more capacious vessel. “It’s the child!” he had exclaimed to her almost as soon as she appeared; and though her direct response was for some time delayed he could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might have been simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence altogether of truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be offered her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should _ces dames_ prove to be but persons about whom—once thus face to face with them—she found she might from the first have told him almost everything? This would have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her their name. There could be no better example—and she appeared to note it with high amusement—than the way, making things out already so much for himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds. They were neither more nor less, she and the child’s mother, than old school-friends—friends who had scarcely met for years but whom this unlooked-for chance had brought together with a rush. It was a relief, Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer groping; she was unaccustomed to grope and as a general thing, he might well have seen, made straight enough for her clue. With the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder. “She’s coming to see me—that’s for _you_,” Strether’s counsellor continued; “but I don’t require it to know where I am.”