t least, to
find that they were total strangers. Unless, indeed, he had met her
and forgotten it. They had possibly held some conversation together in
a London drawing-room. But how could he have been such a boor as to
forget her? She was neither a crook nor a mad woman--she might be an
adventuress; if so, she was an unusual one. He glanced at her luggage
as if it might help him--a dark-covered dressing-case, bundle of furs,
and rugs--new, everything new. Her left hand was bare of rings, she
clasped it with her gloved fellow and said warmly:

"I can't believe it possible that you came, actually came, and that we
have so smoothly met! I can't believe nothing has hitched or missed,
or that everything is so cleverly planned and arranged for me, and
least of all I can believe that it should be _you_ who are so sublimely
doing this."

"Ah--" But here Bulstrode tardily started up. _He_ doing it all? At
least if he was, then he must, if nothing else--know! He smiled at her
with a pleasant sense of being in the secret and with indulgent
amusement at her mistake.

"I think--you made a mistake," he began it with commonplaceness, but
his gesture softened the words.

But the lady made a little annoyed "tchk" with her tongue against her
teeth, and threw up her head with an impatient toss, an intensely
foreign way of dismissing his interpolation.

"Don't, in pity's sake, talk like this," she exclaimed. "_Mistake_?
Who under the blue heavens _doesn't_ make them--Certa! Haven't you,
yourself, in spite of your moral, spotless life, haven't even _you_
made them?"

"How," flushed the naive gentleman, on the sudden betrayed into a
mental frankness of self-approval near to conceit, "how does _she_ know
me so well?"

"Who is there," his companion gave him the question in a challenging
tone "to tell each other and every one of us what is or will be a
mistake in his life? Where were everyone's eyes when I married?--Why
didn't someone tell me then that my marriage was a hideous mistake? As
for the rest of it..." she turned away for a second towards the window,
and Bulstrode saw how the hot blood had mounted and her eyes had
changed when after a moment she came back to him again. She put out
towards him a beseeching hand: "_You_ above all men, who are faithful
to an ideal, must not give me old platitudes!"

Bulstrode's head reeled. He felt like a man who after a narcotic finds
his brain suddenly alight and real things