Madame de Vionnet was already on the field, and this gave the drama a quicker pace than he felt it as yet--though his suspense had increased--in the power of any act of his own to do.

He had spent the previous evening with all his old friends together yet he would still have described himself as quite in the dark in respect to a forecast of their influence on his situation.

It was strange now, none the less, that in the light of this unexpected note of her presence he felt Madame de Vionnet a part of that situation as she hadn't even yet been.

She was alone, he found himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing in that--somehow beyond his control--on his personal fate.

Yet she was only saying something quite easy and independent--the thing she had come, as a good friend of Chad's, on purpose to say.