e got up and walked over to the window that looked down on Mrs.
Falconer's trim little garden. A couple of iron chairs and a table
stood under the trees. Early roses had begun to bloom in the beds
whose outlines were thick and dark with heart's-ease. Beyond the iron
rail of the high wall the distant rumble of Paris came to his ears.
Mrs. Falconer's voice behind him said:

"She's a very pretty girl, and young enough to be your daughter."

"No," he said quietly, "not by many years."

As he turned about and came back to the lady the room seemed to have
grown darker and she to sit in the shadow. She leaned toward him,
laughing:

"So you have come to announce at last the famous marriage of yours we
have so often planned together."

Bulstrode stood looking down on her.

"I feel myself responsible," he said gravely. "She was going home, and
by a mistaken impulse I came in and changed her plans. She is
perfectly alone and perfectly poor, and I am not going to add to her
perplexities. I have no one in the world to care what I do. I have no
ties and no duties."

"No," said Mrs. Falconer; "you are wonderfully free."

He said vehemently:

"I am all of a sudden wonderfully miserable."

He had been in the habit for years of suddenly leaving her without any
warning, and now he put out his hand and bade her good-by, and before
she could detain him had made one of many brusque exits from her
presence.

On the following day--a Sunday, as from his delightful apartments in
the Ritz he set forth for the studio, Bulstrode bade good-by to his
bachelor existence. He knew when he should next see the Place Vendome
it would be with the eyes of an engaged man. His life hereafter was to
be shared by a "total stranger." So he pathetically put it, and his
sentimental yearning to share everything with a lovely woman had died a
sudden death.

"There's no one in the world to care a rap what I do--really," he
reflected, "and in this case I have run up against it--that's the long
and the short of the matter--and I shall see it through."

As he set out for Miss Desprey's along his favorite track he remarked
that the gala, festive character of Paris had entirely disappeared.
The season had gone back on him by several months, and the melancholy
of autumn and dreary winter cast a gloom over his boyish spirits. A
very slight rain was falling. Bulstrode began to feel a twinge of
rheumatism in his arm and as he irritably opened hi