 Chad, and we have
just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this intention on hearing from
her of the young man's absence. It was not moreover only the assurance so given
that prompted him; it was the need of causing his conduct to square with another
profession still - the motive he had described to her as his sharpest for now
getting away. If he was to get away because of some of the relations involved in
staying, the cold attitude toward them might look pedantic in the light of
lingering on. He must do both things; he must see Chad, but he must go. The more
he thought of the former of these duties the more he felt himself make a subject
of insistence of the latter. They were alike intensely present to him as he sat
in front of a quiet little café into which he had dropped on quitting Maria's
entresol. The rain that had spoiled his evening with her was over; for it was
still to him as if his evening had been spoiled - though it mightn't have been
wholly the rain. It was late when he left the café, yet not too late; he
couldn't in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the
Boulevard Malesherbes - rather far round - on his way home. Present enough
always was the small circumstance that had originally pressed for him the spring
of so big a difference - the accident of little Bilham's appearance on the
balcony of the mystic troisième at the moment of his first visit, and the effect
of it on his sense of what was then before him. He recalled his watch, his wait,
and the recognition that had proceeded from the young stranger, that had played
frankly into the air and had presently brought him up - things smoothing the way
for his first straight step. He had since had occasion, a few times, to pass the
house without going in; but he had never passed it without again feeling how it
had then spoken to him. He stopped short to-night on coming to sight of it: it
was as if his last day were oddly copying his first. The windows of Chad's
apartment were open to the balcony - a pair of them lighted; and a figure that
had come out and taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose
cigarette-spark he could see leaned on the rail and looked down at him. It
denoted however no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself
in the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so that Chad
