she on her part would
feel a certain embarrassment.

In answer to his ring, not a man servant, but the perfect housekeeper
rustled in, her crisp silks, her cameos, and her "Christmas face," as
one of the little Westboro' chaps had called her rosy countenance, on
one of his few Christmas days.

"Where would Mr. Bulstrode please to have breakfast?"

"Why, wherever it best suited, went with the house, with the day.
Where, indeed, and that was more to the point, would Mrs. Falconer have
it?"

"Mrs. Falconer? Why, Mr. Bulstrode didn't know then that Mrs. Falconer
had gone?"

She saw by his face that he knew nothing less in the world.

Why, directly the despatch had been fetched over from the Abbey
station. There had been but twenty minutes between the getting of it
and her starting away. A motor had been sent with her and the maid,
and Mrs. Falconer had fortunately been able to make the train; the only
one, it so happened, being Christmas Day, that connected with the Dover
and Calais special.

The matter-of-fact bit of news came to Bulstrode so coldly and so
ruthlessly that it took some seconds for the bitter thought that she
had gone because she couldn't trust him, to penetrate. Then this gave
place to an effulgent hope that it might be _herself_ she couldn't
trust! But the discovery that she had left him no message of any kind,
and that she was above all irrevocably gone, struck him more cruelly
than had any blow in his kindly life. He could not suffer in peace
before the bland creature in silks and cameos. Crises and departures,
battle, murder, and sudden death, he felt the housekeeper would accept
serenely should any of them chance to occur at Westboro', and above all
if they were part of the sacred family history. But Mrs. Falconer and
he were not Westboro's, and he wanted to be rid of his companion and to
find himself alone in order to consult time tables, to find out why it
had been imperative to go to Calais, with what boat for America a
Christmas-Day train could possibly connect, and to turn it all over in
his mind. He at first believed that there had never been any telegram
and that she had only employed a polite ruse in order to facilitate her
flight.

Why, at all events, couldn't she have left him a line? She might, he
ruefully complained, have strained a point and wished him a Merry
Christmas! As he walked to and fro in the room now supremely deserted,
he began slowly to approach a certain