At four o’clock that afternoon he had still not seen him, but he was then, as to make up for this, engaged in talk about him with Miss Gostrey. Strether had kept away from home all day, given himself up to the town and to his thoughts, wandered and mused, been at once restless and absorbed—and all with the present climax of a rich little welcome in the Quartier Marbœuf. “Waymarsh has been, ‘unbeknown’ to me, I’m convinced”—for Miss Gostrey had enquired—“in communication with Woollett: the consequence of which was, last night, the loudest possible call for me.” “Do you mean a letter to bring you home?” “No—a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket: a ‘Come back by the first ship.’” Strether’s hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped changing colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional serenity. It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with duplicity: “And you’re going—?” “You almost deserve it when you abandon me so.” She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. “My absence has helped you—as I’ve only to look at you to see. It was my calculation, and I’m justified. You’re not where you were. And the thing,” she smiled, “was for me not to be there either. You can go of yourself.” “Oh but I feel to-day,” he comfortably declared, “that I shall want you yet.” She took him all in again. “Well, I promise you not again to leave you, but it will only be to follow you. You’ve got your momentum and can toddle alone.” He intelligently accepted it. “Yes—I suppose I can toddle. It’s the sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear it—the way I strike him as going—no longer. That’s only the climax of his original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written to Woollett that I’m in peril of perdition.” “Ah good!” she murmured. “But is it only your supposition?” “I make it out—it explains.” “Then he denies?—or you haven’t asked him?” “I’ve not had time,” Strether said; “I made it out but last night, putting various things together, and I’ve not been since then face to face with him.” She wondered. “Because you’re too disgusted? You can’t trust yourself?” He settled his glasses on his nose. “Do I look in a great rage?” “You look divine!” “There’s nothing,” he went on, “to be angry about. He has done me on the contrary a service.” She made it out. “By bringing things to a head?” “How well you understand!” he almost groaned. “Waymarsh won’t in the least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or extenuate. He has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience and after wakeful nights. He’ll recognise that he’s fully responsible, and will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any discussion we may have will bring us quite together again—bridge the dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk about.”