There was something in it at which she flushed. “Yes—there we are. We’re abysses.” At last she smiled. “But I risk her!” He gave himself a shake. “Well then so do I!” But he added as they passed into the house that he would see Chad the first thing in the morning. This was the next day the more easily effected that the young man, as it happened, even before he was down, turned up at his hotel. Strether took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he called greater privacy. He had himself as yet had nothing—they would sit down somewhere together; and when after a few steps and a turn into the Boulevard they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among twenty others, our friend saw in his companion’s move a fear of the advent of Waymarsh. It was the first time Chad had to that extent given this personage “away”; and Strether found himself wondering of what it was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth was in earnest as he hadn’t yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each up to that time been treating as earnestness. It was sufficiently flattering however that the real thing—if this _was_ at last the real thing—should have been determined, as appeared, precisely by an accretion of Strether’s importance. For this was what it quickly enough came to—that Chad, rising with the lark, had rushed down to let him know while his morning consciousness was yet young that he had literally made the afternoon before a tremendous impression. Madame de Vionnet wouldn’t, couldn’t rest till she should have some assurance from him that he _would_ consent again to see her. The announcement was made, across their marble-topped table, while the foam of the hot milk was in their cups and its plash still in the air, with the smile of Chad’s easiest urbanity; and this expression of his face caused our friend’s doubts to gather on the spot into a challenge of the lips. “See here”—that was all; he only for the moment said again “See here.” Chad met it with all his air of straight intelligence, while Strether remembered again that fancy of the first impression of him, the happy young Pagan, handsome and hard but oddly indulgent, whose mysterious measure he had under the street-lamp tried mentally to take. The young Pagan, while a long look passed between them, sufficiently understood. Strether scarce needed at last to say the rest—“I want to know where I am.” But he said it, adding before any answer something more. “Are you engaged to be married—is that your secret?—to the young lady?” Chad shook his head with the slow amenity that was one of his ways of conveying that there was time for everything. “I have no secret—though I may have secrets! I haven’t at any rate that one. We’re not engaged. No.” “Then where’s the hitch?”