quite simply, "I shall
_dot_ the girl."

And then the lady stepped back and looked at him. He felt, before that
she had merely swept him with her eyes; now she looked at him. She
cried his name out--"Jimmy!"--that was all.

But in the exclamation, in the change of her mobile face, in the lovely
gesture that her hand made, as if it would have gone to his, Bulstrode
was forced to feel himself eminently, gloriously repaid, and it is not
too much to say that he did.

THE FIFTH ADVENTURE

V

IN WHICH HE MAKES NOBODY HAPPY AT ALL

Bulstrode stood before the entrance of the Hotel de Paris bidding his
friends good-night. Watching them, at least one of them, enter in
under the shelter of the glass pavilion, he considered how much more
lonely he was at that special moment than he could remember having been
before. Of course he had bidden Mary Falconer good-night a hundred
dozen times in the course of his life, but it seemed to come with a
more sublime significance than ever how he gave her up every time he
said good-by and how he was himself left alone. And yet, had Mrs.
Falconer been asked, she would have said that she never found her
friend more cold and more constrained. In his correct evening dress
with the flower she herself had given him in his buttonhole, his panama
in his hand, he had been absorbed in her beauty, in the grace of her
dark dress, bright with scintillating ornaments--her big feathered hat
under which her face was more lovely, more alluring than ever; and
nothing in his eyes told the woman what he thought and felt.

She touched his arm, saying:

"Look, Jimmy."

"Isn't that the lovely woman we've so often remarked? See, she's all
alone, how curious! She's going over to the Casino to play, I suppose.
_What_ can have happened to the man who has been with her all this
time? Where is the Prince Pollona?"

As Bulstrode turned his head in the direction indicated, through the
trees passed along the figure of a slender woman, trailing her thin
gown over the pebbles and the grass. She disappeared in the lighted
doorway of the Casino.

"You're quite bearish to-night," Mrs. Falconer said reproachfully,
"quite a bear. I believe you're angry! Dear Jimmy, you may, I
promise, carry out all your philanthropies without my interference; I
won't even criticise or tease. I promise you next time you shall go
sweetly and serenely on your foolish way!"

"Oh," he got out with effort, "I believe