I Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours definitely expected it; yet when, later on, that morning--though no later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o'clock--he saw the concierge produce, on his approach, a petit bleu delivered since his letters had been sent up, he recognised the appearance as the first symptom of a sequel.

He then knew he had been thinking of some early sign from Chad as more likely, after all, than not; and this would be precisely the early sign.

He took it so for granted that he opened the petit bleu just where he had stopped, in the pleasant cool draught of the porte-cochere--only curious to see where the young man would, at such a juncture, break out.

His curiosity, however, was more than gratified; the small missive, whose gummed edge he had detached without attention to the address, not being from the young man at all, but from the person whom the case gave him on the spot as still more worth while.
Worth while or not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the big one on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a fear of the danger of delay.

He might have been thinking that if he didn't go before he could think he wouldn't perhaps go at all.