Mr.Strether and I are very old friends," Sarah allowed, "but the privilege of his society isn't a thing I shall quarrel about with any one." "And yet, dear Sarah," he freely broke in, "I feel, when I hear you say that, that you don't quite do justice to the important truth of the extent to which--as you're also mine--I'm your natural due.

I should like much better," he laughed, "to see you fight for me." She met him, Mrs.Pocock, on this, with an arrest of speech--with a certain breathlessness, as he immediately fancied, on the score of a freedom for which she wasn't quite prepared.

It had flared up--for all the harm he had intended by it--because, confoundedly, he didn't want any more to be afraid about her than he wanted to be afraid about Madame de Vionnet.

He had never, naturally, called her anything but Sarah at home, and though he had perhaps never quite so markedly invoked her as his "dear," that was somehow partly because no occasion had hitherto laid so effective a trap for it.

But something admonished him now that it was too late--unless indeed it were possibly too early; and that he at any rate shouldn't have pleased Mrs.Pocock the more by it.