a at length of going up to his room, walked
across the salon and prepared to extinguish the electricity, but the
sound of some one tapping without caught his ear, and going over to the
window that gave on the street, he looked out. From end to end the
alley was deserted except for the figure of a woman. As he saw in the
ruddy light of early morning she huddled against the threshold of the
_hotel meuble_--knocking persistently at the door. The tattered gauze
of her dress, whose bold _decolletee_ left her neck and shoulders bare,
a garland of roses on the bandeaux of her black hair, she epitomized
the carnival just come to its end--its exhaustion, its excess, spent at
length, surfeited, knocking for entrance at last to rest. Bulstrode,
as he remarked the sinuous figure that swayed as the woman stood,
exclaimed to himself with illumination: "Why, she's the _fish_, of
course! Simone's mother! And this is the state in which she goes to
the miserable child!"

As, knocking at intervals, the object leaned there a few moments
longer, evidently scarcely able to stand, his pity wakened and he
slowly left the window, shut in its blinds, and crossed his
ante-chamber, where the artificial light of electricity was met by the
full sunshine of the breaking day streaming in through the open window
of his terrace. Not entirely sure of his motive or to what excess of
folly it might lead him, he nevertheless opened wide his front door,
only to see that the woman on the opposite street had gone. She had
been let in. With a glance of relief up and down the street where the
_confetti_ in disks of lilac and yellow and red lay in dirty piles or
swam on the flushing gutters that sparkled in the light, Bulstrode shot
to his door on the Parisian world and after a _nuit blanche_ went
upstairs to his rooms.

And there had intensely come to him during the period of his dressing
the next morning after a tardy wakening the idea of taking the child,
of--he was certain it could be done--buying the mother off. He would,
in short, if he could, legally adopt the Parisian _gamine_ for his own.
It would give him a distinct interest, and life was empty for want of
one; this, in a manner, however short of perfect, would supply the need
of a loving living creature in his environment and would--his thrill at
the idea proved to him how lonely he had been--give him companionship
and a responsibility of a tender, personal sort. He could make a home
at