ith
the woman he had left some few hours before. All his emotions
culminated in a high, swinging excitement. The fact that he was going
back alone to find Mary Falconer there, was the big motif, and as he
thought of the dark, charming envelope the castle made, holding the
treasure she was, keeping her there for him, his heart beat so high
that he knew there was nothing more for him to feel. The ecstasy he
had witnessed in the little house his chivalry had purchased, the
meeting of the husband and wife, come together there after so much
unhappiness, put it poignantly to him that sterile love is a very
unsatisfactory thing indeed. And if the highest quality of gallantry
is to consider a woman's honor before her love, it at least makes real
happiness--so he felt then--impossible in the world.

One false swerve of the motor at the pace they were going, and there
would not be any more problems to solve. If he died now he might
justly say that he had not lived, he had not lived! Who would give him
back what he had missed? The motto on the dials repeated itself to
him: _Utere dum licet_.

He pushed into the castle on his arrival, hurried to dress, and went
downstairs. It seemed to him as he put aside the portieres, that these
curtains were at last all there was between himself and her, that he
was going home, coming home at last; that ways he had for years seen
approaching, met at length to-night here. It was with the very clear
realization of the culmination of the time that Bulstrode went in to
find his friend.

He had stopped to make himself irreproachable, and expected to find her
waiting and friendly and lovely. What, had he found her anything else?
But as rising from her chair, the scarf slipping back from her bare
shoulders, she put out her hand and greeted him, the dazzling sense
that breaks on a man's consciousness when he finds himself alone with
the woman he loves, proved for a second that he had need of all his
control. He could not speak.

"Jimmy!" she exclaimed, "you're as white as a ghost! You look as
though you'd been to a wake; and I don't believe you've had a mouthful
of dinner."

He remembered that it might be polite to apologize to her for the
entire desertion of the household.

"My poor friend, what in Heaven's name must you think of us all!"

"Of you all?" (True enough, there had been another!) She had thought
volumes, comedies, tragedies, melodramas, but what she thought didn't
so