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's
was the attention that after he had stepped forward into the street
and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad's was the voice that,
sounding into the night with promptness and seemingly with joy,
greeted him and called him up.
That the young man had been visible there just in this position
expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported,
he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each
landing--the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work--before the
implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely away,
away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and
the attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more
than a return--it was clearly a conscious surrender.
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