"Unless you can help me through, Mr. Bulstrode--it is your fault, after
all."

If this were a virtual throwing of herself into his arms, they were all
but open to her and the generous heart was all but ready "to see her
through." Bulstrode was about to do, and say, the one rash and
irrevocable perfect thing when at this minute fate again at the ring of
the curtain opportuned. The tap, tapping, of a pony's feet was heard
and a gay little cart came brightly along. Bulstrode saw it. He
sprang to his feet. It was close upon them.

"You will let me come to-morrow?" he asked eagerly,

"Oh, yes," she whispered; "yes, I shall count on you. I beg you will
come."

"Jimmy," said the lady severely as he accepted her invitation to get
into the cart, "this is the second wicked rendezvous I have
interrupted. I didn't know you were anything like this, and I've seen
that girl before, but I can't remember where."

"Don't try," said Bulstrode.

"And she was crying. Of course you made her cry."

"Well," said Bulstrode desperately, "if I did, it's the first woman
that has ever cried for me."

As the reason why Bulstrode had never married was again in Paris, he
went up in the late afternoon to see her.

The train of visitors who showed their appreciation of her by thronging
her doors had been turned away, but Bulstrode was admitted. The man
told him, "Mrs. Falconer will see you, sir," by which he had the
agreeably flattered feeling that she would see nobody else.

When he was opposite her the room at once dwindled, contracted, as
invariably did every place in which they found themselves together,
into one small circle containing himself and one woman. Mrs. Falconer
said at once to Bulstrode:

"Jimmy, you're in trouble--in one of your quandaries. What useless
good have you been doing, and who has been sharper than a serpent's
tooth to you?"

Bulstrode's late companionship with youth had imparted to him a boyish
look. His friend narrowly observed him, and her charming face clouded
with one of those almost imperceptible _nuances_ that the faces of
those women wear who feel everything and by habit reveal nothing.

"I'm not a victim." Bulstrode's tone was regretful. "One might say,
on the contrary, this time that I was possibly overpaid."

"Yes?"

"I haven't," he explained and regretted, "seen you for a long time."

"I've been automobiling in Touraine." Mrs. Falconer gave him no
opportunity to be delinquent